Astreaks

• Verfasst von: Sharma, Kritti [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Kumar, Harsh [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Choudhary, Harsh [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Bhalerao, Varun [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Swain, Vishwajeet [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Bolin, Bryce [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Anupama, G C [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Barway, Sudhanshu [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Joharle, Simran [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Shenoy, Vedant [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: Astreaks
• Titelzusatz: astrometry of NEOs with trailed background stars
• Verf.angabe: Kritti Sharma, Harsh Kumar, Harsh Choudhary, Varun Bhalerao, Vishwajeet Swain, Bryce Bolin, G.C. Anupama, Sudhanshu Barway, Simran Joharle, Vedant Shenoy
• E-Jahr: 2023
• Jahr: September 2023
• Umfang: 10 S.
• Fussnoten: Online veröffentlicht: 3. Juli 2023 ; Gesehen am 28.11.2023
• Titel Quelle: Enthalten in: Royal Astronomical SocietyMonthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Ort Quelle: Oxford : Oxford Univ. Press, 1827
• Jahr Quelle: 2023
• Band/Heft Quelle: 524(2023), 2 vom: Sept., Seite 2651-2660
• ISSN Quelle: 1365-2966
• DOI: doi:10.1093/mnras/stad1989
• Datenträger: Online-Ressource
• Sprache: eng
• K10plus-PPN: 187151116X

Abstract

The detection and accurate astrometry of fast-moving near-Earth objects (NEOs) has been a challenge for the follow-up community. Their fast apparent motion results in streaks in sidereal images, thus affecting the telescope’s limiting magnitude and astrometric accuracy. A widely adopted technique to mitigate trailing losses is non-sidereal tracking, which transfers the streaking to background reference stars. However, no existing publicly available astrometry software is configured to detect such elongated stars. We present Astreaks, a streaking source detection algorithm, to obtain accurate astrometry of NEOs in non-sidereal data. We validate the astrometric accuracy of Astreaks on 371 non-sidereally tracked images for 115 NEOs with two instrument set-ups of the GROWTH-India Telescope. The observed NEOs had V-band magnitude in the range [15, 22] with proper motion up to 140 arcsec min−1, thus resulting in stellar streaks as high as 6.5 arcmin (582 pixels) in our data. Our method obtained astrometric solutions for all images with 100 per cent success rate. The standard deviation in observed-minus-computed (O-C) residuals is 0.52 arcsec with O-C residuals <2 arcsec (<1 arcsec) for 98.4 per cent (84.4 per cent) of our measurements. These are appreciable, given the pixel scale of ∼0.3 and ∼0.7 arcsec of our two instrument set-ups. This demonstrates that our modular and fully automated algorithm helps improve the telescope system’s limiting magnitude without compromising astrometric accuracy by enabling non-sidereal tracking on the target. This will help the NEO follow-up community cope with the accelerated discovery rates and improved sensitivity of the next-generation NEO surveys. Astreaks has been made available to the community under an open-source license.