A-PHOT: a new, versatile code for precision aperture photometry

Abstract

Aims. We present A-PHOT, a new publicly available code for performing aperture photometry on astronomical images, that is particularly well suited for multi-band extragalactic surveys. Methods.A-PHOT estimates the fluxes emitted by astronomical objects within a chosen set of circular or elliptical apertures. Unlike other widely used codes, it runs on predefined lists of detected sources, allowing for repeated measurements on the same list of objects on different images. This can be very useful when forced photometric measurement on a given position is needed. A-PHOT can also estimate morphological parameters and a local background flux, and compute on-the-fly individual optimized elliptical apertures, in which the signal-to-noise ratio is maximized. Results. We check the performance of A-PHOT on both synthetic and real test datasets: we explore a simulated case of a space-based high-resolution imaging dataset, investigating the input parameter space to optimize the accuracy of the performance, and we exploit the CANDELS GOODS-South data to compare the A-PHOT measurements with those from the survey legacy catalogs, finding good agreement overall. Conclusions.A-PHOT proves to a useful and versatile tool for quickly extracting robust and accurate photometric measurements and basic morphological information of galaxies and stars, with the advantage of allowing for various measurements of fluxes at any chosen position without the need of a full detection run, and for determining the basic morphological features of the sources.