Simulation on the Measurement Method of Geometric Distortion of Telescopes

Abstract

The accurate measurement on the effect of telescope geometric distortion is conducive to improving the astrometric positioning accuracy of telescopes, which is of significant importance for many disciplines of astronomy, such as stellar clusters, natural satellites, asteroids, comets, and other celestial bodies in the solar system. For this reason, the predecessors have developed an iterative self-calibration method to measure the telescope geometric distortion by dithering observations in a dense star field, and achieved fine results. However, the previous work did not make constraints on the density of star field, and the dithering mode, but chose empirically some good conditions (for example, a denser star field and a larger dithering number) to observe, which took up much observing time, and caused a rather low efficiency. In order to explore the validity of the self-calibration method, and optimize its observational conditions, it is necessary to carry out the corresponding simulations. In this paper, we introduce first the self-calibration method in detail, then by the simulation method, we verify the effectiveness of the self-calibration method, and make further optimizations on the observational conditions, such as the density of star field and the dithering number, to achieve a higher accuracy of geometric distortion measurement. Finally, taking consideration of the practical application for correcting the geometric distortion effect, we have analyzed the relationship between the number of reference stars in the field of view and the astrometric accuracy by virtue of the simulation method.