Photometry from online Digitized Sky Survey plates

Abstract

Online Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) material is often used to obtain information on newly discovered variable stars for older epochs (e.g. Nova progenitors, flare stars, etc.). We present here the results of an investigation of photometry on online DSS material in small fields calibrated by CCD sequences. We compared different source extraction mechanisms and found that even down near to the sensitivity limit, despite the H-compression used for the online material, photometry with an accuracy better than 0.1 mag rms is possible on DSS-II. Our investigation shows that the accuracy depends strongly on the source extraction method. The SuperCOSMOS scans, although retrieved with a higher spatial resolution, do not give us better results. The methods and parameters presented here allow the user to obtain good plate photometry in small fields down to the Schmidt plate survey limits with a few bright CCD calibrators, which may be calibrated with amateur-size telescopes. Especially for the events mentioned above, new field photometry for calibration purposes mostly exists, but the progenitors were not measured photometrically before. Also, the follow-up whether stellar concentrations are newly detected clusters or similar work may be done without using mid-size telescopes. The calibration presented here is a ‘local’ one for small fields. We show that the method presented here gives higher accuracies than ‘global’ calibrations of surveys (e.g. Guide Star Catalogue-II (GSC-II), SuperCOSMOS and the US Naval Observatory Astrometry Catalog B).