Abstract
Abstract The low mass end of the Initial Mass Function (IMF) is a component of star formation that is not well understood. By analyzing Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images of star-forming regions, we aimed to provide data to constrain the shape of the low-mass IMF. We performed point-spread function (PSF) fitting using the Astropy Photutils package v0.6 on shallow HST Wide Field Camera 3 images taken in filters F110W, F139M, and F160W with the goal of identifying low mass stars and brown dwarfs. Residual images from our PSF fitting routine showed that fainter sources were effectively fit while fits to the brighter sources left residuals. Despite this, analysis confirmed that our PSF magnitudes are consistent with aperture magnitudes and mostly have smaller errors; 85%–100% of the flux was captured by the PSF fitting in most cases. PSF fitting of WFC3-IR images using Photutils shows promise for precise photometry.
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