Development of a Data Reduction algorithm for Optical Wide Field Patrol

Abstract

The detector subsystem of the Optical Wide-field Patrol (OWL) network efficiently acquires the position and time information of moving objects such as artificial satellites through its chopper system, which consists of 4 blades in front of the CCD camera. Using this system, it is possible to get more position data with the same exposure time by changing the streaks of the moving objects into many pieces with the fast rotating blades during sidereal tracking. At the same time, the time data from the rotating chopper can be acquired by the time tagger connected to the photo diode. To analyze the orbits of the targets detected in the image data of such a system, a sequential procedure of determining the positions of separated streak lines was developed that involved calculating the World Coordinate System (WCS) solution to transform the positions into equatorial coordinate systems, and finally combining the time log records from the time tagger with the transformed position data. We introduce this procedure and the preliminary results of the application of this procedure to the test observation images.

Keywords

• data reduction
• algorithm
• optical
• wide field