Robust Automated Photometry Pipeline for Blurred Images

The primary task of the 1.26 m telescope jointly operated by the National Astronomical Observatory and Guangzhou University is photometric observations of the g, r, and i bands. A data processing pipeline system was set up with mature software packages, such as IRAF, SExtractor, and SCAMP, to process approximately 5 GB of observational data automatically every day. However, the success ratio was significantly reduced when processing blurred images owing to telescope tracking error; this, in turn, significantly constrained the output of the telescope. We propose a robust automated photometric pipeline (RAPP) software that can correctly process blurred images. Two key techniques are presented in detail: blurred star enhancement and robust image matching. A series of tests proved that RAPP not only achieves a photometric success ratio and precision comparable to those of IRAF but also significantly reduces the data processing load and improves the efficiency.