No Arabic abstract
Lucky imaging is a high-resolution astronomical image recovery technique with two classic implementation algorithms, i.e. image selecting, shifting and adding in image space and data selecting and image synthesizing in Fourier space. This paper proposes a novel lucky imaging algorithm where with space-domain and frequency-domain selection rates as a link, the two classic algorithms are combined successfully, making each algorithm a proper subset of the novel hybrid algorithm. Experimental results show that with the same experiment dataset and platform, the high-resolution image obtained by the proposed algorithm is superior to that obtained by the two classic algorithms. This paper also proposes a new lucky image selection and storage scheme, which can greatly save computer memory and enable lucky imaging algorithm to be implemented in a common desktop or laptop with small memory and to process astronomical images with more frames and larger size. Besides, through simulation analysis, this paper discusses the binary star detection limits of the novel lucky imaging algorithm and traditional ones under different atmospheric conditions.
Presented here is list of 50 pairs quasi-evenly spaced over the northern sky, and that have Separations and Position Angles accurate at the milli-arcsec, and milli-degree level. These pairs are suggested as calibration pairs for lucky imaging observations. This paper is a follow-up to our previous paper regarding southern sky calibration pairs.
A prototype of a low cost Adaptive Optics (AO) system has been developed at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (CSIC) and tested at the 2.2m telescope of the Calar Alto observatory. We present here the status of the project, which includes the image stabilization system and compensation of high order wavefront aberrations with a membrane deformable mirror. The image stabilization system consists of magnet driven tip-tilt mirror. The higher order compensation system comprises of a Shack-Hartmann sensor, a membrane deformable mirror with 39 actuators and the control computer that allows operations up to 420Hz in closed loop mode. We have successfully closed the high order AO loop on natural guide stars. An improvement of 4 times in terms of FWHM was achieved. The description and the results obtained on the sky are presented in this paper.
The potential of combining Adaptive Optics (AO) and Lucky Imaging (LI) to achieve high precision astrometry and differential photometry in the optical is investigated by conducting observations of the close 0farcs1 brown dwarf binary GJ569Bab. We took 50000 $I$-band images with our LI instrument FastCam attached to NAOMI, the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope (WHT) AO facility. In order to extract the most of the astrometry and photometry of the GJ569Bab system we have resorted to a PSF fitting technique using the primary star GJ569A as a suitable PSF reference which exhibits an $I$-band magnitude of $7.78pm0.03$. The AO+LI observations at WHT were able to resolve the binary system GJ569Bab located at $4farcs 92 pm 0farcs05$ from GJ569A. We measure a separation of $98.4 pm 1.1$ mas and $I$-band magnitudes of $13.86 pm 0.03$ and $14.48 pm 0.03$ and $I-J$ colors of 2.72$pm$0.08 and 2.83$pm$0.08 for the Ba and Bb components, respectively. Our study rules out the presence of any other companion to GJ569A down to magnitude I$sim$ 17 at distances larger than 1arcsec. The $I-J$ colors measured are consistent with M8.5-M9 spectral types for the Ba and Bb components. The available dynamical, photometric and spectroscopic data are consistent with a binary system with Ba being slightly (10-20%) more massive than Bb. We obtain new orbital parameters which are in good agreement with those in the literature.
The knowledge of the binary properties of metal-poor and solar-metallicity stars can shed light on the potential differences between the formation processes responsible for both types of objects. The aim of the project is to determine the binary properties (separation, mass ratio, frequency of companions) for M subdwarfs, the low-metallicity counterparts of field M dwarfs, and investigate any potential differences between both populations. We have obtained high-resolution imaging in the optical for a sample of 24 early-M subdwarfs and nine extreme subdwarfs with the ``Lucky Imaging technique using the AstraLux instrument on the Calar Alto 2.2-m telescope. We are sensitive to companions at separations larger than 0.1 arcsec and differences of ~2 magnitudes at 0.1 arcsec and ~5 mag at 1 arcsec. We have found no companion around the 24 subdwarfs under study and one close binary out of nine extreme subdwarfs. A second image of LHS 182 taken three months later with the same instrument confirms the common proper motion of the binary separated by about 0.7 arcsec. Moreover, we do not confirm the common proper motion of the faint source reported by Riaz and collaborators at ~2 arcsec from LHS 1074. We derive a binary frequency of 3+/-3% for M subdwarfs from our sample of 33 objects for separations larger than about five astronomical units. Adding to our sample the additional 28 metal-poor early-M dwarfs observed with the Hubble Space Telescope by Riaz and collaborators, we infer a binary fraction of 3.7+/-2.6% (with a 1 sigma confidence limit), significantly lower than the fraction of resolved binary M dwarfs (~20%) over the same mass and separation ranges (abridged).
We present a grism extraction package (LINEAR) designed to reconstruct one-dimensional spectra from a collection of slitless spectroscopic images, ideally taken at a variety of orientations, dispersion directions, and/or dither positions. Our approach is to enumerate every transformation between all direct image positions (ie. a potential source) and the collection of grism images at all relevant wavelengths. This leads to solving a large, sparse system of linear equations, which we invert using the standard LSQR algorithm. We implement a number of color and geometric corrections (such as flat field, pixel-area map, source morphology, and spectral bandwidth), but assume many effects have been calibrated out (such as basic reductions, background subtraction, and astrometric refinement). We demonstrate the power of our approach with several Monte Carlo simulations and the analysis of archival data. The simulations include astrometric and photometric uncertainties, sky-background estimation, and signal-to-noise calculations. The data are G141 observations obtained with the Wide-Field Camera 3 of the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, and show the power of our formalism by improving the spectral resolution without sacrificing the signal-to-noise (a tradeoff that is often made by current approaches). Additionally, our approach naturally accounts for source contamination, which is only handled heuristically by present softwares. We conclude with a discussion of various observations where our approach will provide much improved spectral one-dimensional spectra, such as crowded fields (star or galaxy clusters), spatially resolved spectroscopy, or surveys with strict completeness requirements. At present our software is heavily geared for Wide-Field Camera 3 IR, however we plan extend the codebase for additional instruments.