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Automated Proper Motion Survey: Data Reduction and Initial System Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

A. E. La Bonte
A. E. La Bonte*
Affiliation:
Control Data Corporation

Extract

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The Automated Proper Motion Survey (APMS) has three broad goals-accuracy, completeness, and efficiency in the discovery and measurement of stellar proper motions on pairs of red-sensitive photographic star plates taken with the forty-eight inch Schmidt telescope. The specific range of motions sought is from 0.1 to 2.5 seconds-of-arc per year. The lower limit of 0.1 arc sec/year is consistent with the inherent uncertainties in the photographic emulsion and the typical epoch difference between plate exposures. At the opposite end of the scale, extension of the search radius beyond that corresponding to 2.5 arc sec/year would result in a prohibitively large number of spurious matches and a significant increase in processing time while yielding extremely few (though individually interesting) additional stellar motions. The specific range of stellar magnitudes sought is from 12 to 19 red. Significant motions for stars brighter than the limit mred = 12 are already fairly well documented and the corresponding bright Schmidt images begin to show extensive contamination from diffraction spikes, “blazes” radially away from the plate center, and photographic “bloom”. At the other limit, although images of stars fainter than mred = 19 are visually discernible on the plates (the plate limit is typically mred= 20), inspection of the faintest images reveals that they are amorphous and often quite asymmetric clusters of photographic grain. Thus, both the motion limits and the magnitude limits for the survey have been selected to cover the range of reliable and largely unexplored data on the plate material. The implementation of APMS, then, is tailored to these goals and ranges.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 7: Proper Motions , August 1965 , pp. 26 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © University of Minnesota 1970

References

1.“The National Geographic Society – Palomar Observatory Sky Survey Minkowski, R.L. and Abell, G.O., Appendix II, BASIC ASTRONOMICAL DATA, edited by Strand, K. A., pages 481–487, University of Chicago Press, 1963.Google Scholar
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