Center determination for trailed sources in astronomical observation images

Le résumé fourni par la source

Images with trailed sources can be obtained when observing near-Earth objects, such as small astroids, space debris, major planets and their satellites, no matter the telescopes track on sidereal speed or the speed of target. The low centering accuracy of these trailed sources is one of the most important sources of the astrometric uncertainty, but how to determine the central positions of the trailed sources accurately remains a significant challenge to image processing techniques, especially in the study of faint or fast moving objects. According to the conditions of one-meter telescope at Weihai Observatory of Shandong University, moment and point-spread-function (PSF) fitting were chosen to develop the image processing pipeline for space debris. The principles and the implementations of both two methods are introduced in this paper. And some simulated images containing trailed sources are analyzed with each technique. The results show that two methods are comparable to obtain the accurate central positions of trailed sources when the signal to noise (SNR) is high. But moment tends to fail for the objects with low SNR. Compared with moment, PSF fitting seems to be more robust and versatile. However, PSF fitting is quite time-consuming. Therefore, if there are enough bright stars in the field, or the high astronometric accuracy is not necessary, moment is competent. Otherwise, the combination of moment and PSF fitting is recommended.

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