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Moving Objects

 

Main-belt asteroids have a proper motion of several arcsec in the roughly 5 minutes it takes for an object to cross the imaging camera. This means that they will have a different centroid in the different photometric bands. If not taken into account, this could mean that they would be deblended into separate objects of unusual color, playing havoc with the target selection algorithms (§ 4.8). Thus the deblender checks every object for consistency with uniform proper motion between the filters. In the PhotoObj class (Table 6) the quantities colv and rowv (and their associated errors), give the resulting proper motion (along the columns and rows of the CCDs respectively) in units of degrees per day. The PSF photometry in each band is done on the object center, taking the motion into account, and therefore is properly measured ivezic01.

Flag bit values listed in Table 9 describe this processing. The MOVED flag indicates that the deblender considered whether to deblend the object as moving; it is not very useful. If the deblender actually deblended the object as moving, the flag DEBLENDED_AS_MOVING is set; otherwise the flag NODEBLEND_MOVING is set. Note that an object can have a statistically significant motion without being deblended as such if the motion is small enough that the photometry would be fine without taking it into account. An object whose motion is not statistically significant is flagged STATIONARY, while an object whose motion is inconsistent with a straight line is flagged BAD_MOVING_FIT.



Michael Strauss
Thu Jan 30 11:15:34 EST 2003