POINT-SPREAD FUNCTIONS FOR THE EXTREME-ULTRAVIOLET CHANNELS OFSDO/AIA TELESCOPES

Abstract

We present the stray-light point-spread functions (PSFs) and their inverses we characterized for the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) EUV telescopes on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft. The inverse kernels are approximate inverses under convolution. Convolving the original Level 1 images with them produces images with improved stray-light characteristics. We demonstrate the usefulness of these PSFs by applying them to two specific cases: photometry and differential emission measure (DEM) analysis. The PSFs consist of a narrow Gaussian core, a diffraction component, and a diffuse component represented by the sum of a Gaussian-truncated Lorentzian and a shoulder Gaussian. We determined the diffraction term using the measured geometry of the diffraction pattern identified in flare images and the theoretically computed intensities of the principal maxima of the first few diffraction orders. To determine the diffuse component, we fitted its parameterized model using iterative forward-modeling of the lunar interior in the SDO/AIA images from the 2011 March 4 lunar transit. We find that deconvolution significantly improves the contrast in dark features such as miniature coronal holes, though the effect was marginal in bright features. On a percentage-scattering basis, the PSFs for SDO/AIA are better by a factor of two than that of the EUV telescope on board the Transition Region And Coronal Explorer mission. A preliminary analysis suggests that deconvolution alone does not affect DEM analysis of small coronal loop segments with suitable background subtraction. We include the derived PSFs and their inverses as supplementary digital materials.