http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04672
Photographic plate archives contain a wealth of information about positions and brightness celestial objects had decades ago. Plate digitization is necessary to make this information accessible, but extracting it is a technical challenge. We develop algorithms used to extract photometry with the accuracy of better than ~0.1m in the magnitude range 13<B<17 from photographic images obtained in 1948-1996 with the 40cm Sternberg institute’s astrograph (30x30cm plate size, 10x10deg field of view) and digitized using a flatbed scanner. The extracted photographic lightcurves are used to identify thousands of new high-amplitude (>0.2m) variable stars. The algorithms are implemented in the free software VaST available at this http URL
K. Sokolovsky, A. Zubareva, D. Kolesnikova, et. al.
Thu, 14 Dec 17
49/74
Comments: 4 pages, 3 figures; proceedings of the IAU Symposium 339 Southern Horizons in Time-Domain Astronomy, 13-17 November 2017, Stellenbosch, South Africa