Performing Automated, High-Speed Photometry on Occulting, Small Outer Solar System Bodies

Ben Attwood; James Robinson

doi:10.2218/esjs.9682

Authors

Ben Mark Attwood School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh https://orcid.org/0009-0000-7143-9246
James E. Robinson School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2121-6375

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2218/esjs.9682

Keywords:

Photometry, Software

Abstract

Monitoring stellar occultations provides a powerful means to measure the shapes and sizes of small Solar System bodies, but produces large quantities of image data which can be laborious to analyse. An automated Python-based software, occ_find, was written for performing high-speed aperture photometry on spool files packed with large volumes of images from the 1.54m Danish Telescope. occ_find processed 11 spool files at a maximum rate of around 4–6 minutes per spool file, without image reduction. From these files, 3 occultation events were detected. The measured chord lengths are consistent with prior size measurements of these small bodies.

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