An Adaptive Homomorphic Aperture Photometry Algorithm for Merging Galaxies

Abstract

We present a novel automatic adaptive aperture photometry algorithm for measuring the total magnitudes of merging galaxies with irregular shapes. First, we use a morphological pattern recognition routine for identifying the shape of an irregular source in a background-subtracted image. Then, we extend the shape of the source by using the Dilation image operation to obtain an aperture that is quasi-homomorphic to the shape of the irregular source. The magnitude measured from the homomorphic aperture would thus have minimal contamination from the nearby background. As a test of our algorithm, we applied our technique to the merging galaxies observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope. Our results suggest that the adaptive homomorphic aperture algorithm can be very useful for investigating extended sources with irregular shapes and sources in crowded regions.