Accurate Photometry with Digitized Photographic Plates of the Moscow Collection
Abstract
Photographic plate archives contain a wealth of information about the positions and brightness of celestial objects decades ago. Plate digitization is necessary to make this information accessible, but extracting it is a technical challenge. We have developed algorithms to extract photometry with an accuracy of better than ~0.1 mag. in the range 13 < B < 17 mag from photographic images obtained in 1948-1996 with the 40-cm Sternberg Institute astrograph (30 × 30 cm plate size, 10 × 10 deg field of view) and digitized using a flatbed scanner. The extracted photographic light-curves are used to identify thousands of new high-amplitude variable stars (>0.2 mag). The algorithms are implemented in the free software VaST available at http://scan.sai.msu.ru/vast/
- Publication:
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Southern Horizons in Time-Domain Astronomy
- Pub Date:
- August 2019
- DOI:
- 10.1017/S174392131800296X
- Bibcode:
- 2019IAUS..339..340S
- Keywords:
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- Techniques: photometric;
- stars: variables: other