Automatic Computer Reduction of Astronomical Television Images

Extract

During the 15 months that we operated the Celescope experiment on the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, we acquired 8700 television frames of star fields containing a total of approximately 10 000 stars.

Figure 1 shows an example of one of these frames. Note the target ring, an aluminum deposit on the target of the tube, in each corner of the picture; the shadow in the upper left corner; the calibration lamp just below the center of the picture; and its ghost slightly below and to the left. All other objects are stars. Each frame consists of 256 scan lines designated by the number k, with each line containing 251 pixels (picture elements) designated by the number l, making a total of 65 000 intensity points I(k, l). The frames are divided into two spectral regions by two filters—lines 1 to 128 have one spectral range, lines 129 to 256 have a different one. Hence, each frame is reduced as two half frames in the first portion of the reduction system.