Tim Naylor's Optimal Photometry Page
How do you go about measuring the flux from stars in a CCD image to get the
highest possible signal-to-noise?
It turns out there is a much better way than either aperture
photometry or profile fitting, called optimal photometry.
The basic technique, and its application to time-series photometry is
described in
Naylor (1998), and its application to colour-magnitude diagrams in
Naylor et al (2002).
There is also a
conference paper,
I presented at the 13th North American CV Workshop.
You can see the results of using optimal photometry in some of the
citatations
of the original paper, and on my page of
photometric catalogues.
For those of you wanting to use the algorithm, its been implemented
in the Starlink
PHOTOM package, and hence is also available in
GAIA.
Tom Marsh has used in his pipeline reduction for
ULTRACAM,
and it has also been used for SEST mm data
(
Carpenter et al, 2005).
Finally, if you want to write your own implementation, here is my
Fortran90 code, and associated
documentation.
There is also a discussion of the
inner radius of the
sky box, which was not covered in either paper.
There is also a discussion of the
key points of the optimal photometry
software we use for colour magnitude diagrams.