IPAC Image Processing and Data Archiving for the Palomar Transient Factory

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a multiepochal robotic survey of the northern sky that acquires data for the scientific study of transient and variable astrophysical phenomena. The camera and telescope provide for wide-field imaging in optical bands. In the five years of operation since first light on 2008 December 13, images taken with Mould-R and SDSS-g′ camera filters have been routinely acquired on a nightly basis (weather permitting), and two different Hα filters were installed in 2011 May (656 and 663 nm). The PTF image-processing and data-archival program at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) is tailored to receive and reduce the data, and, from it, generate and preserve astrometrically and photometrically calibrated images, extracted source catalogs, and co-added reference images. Relational databases have been deployed to track these products in operations and the data archive. The fully automated system has benefited by lessons learned from past IPAC projects and comprises advantageous features that are potentially incorporable into other ground-based observatories. Both off-the-shelf and in-house software have been utilized for economy and rapid development. The PTF data archive is curated by the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA). A state-of-the-art custom Web interface has been deployed for downloading the raw images, processed images, and source catalogs from IRSA. Access to PTF data products is currently limited to an initial public data release (M81, M44, M42, SDSS Stripe 82, and the Kepler Survey Field). It is the intent of the PTF collaboration to release the full PTF data archive when sufficient funding becomes available

The Science Case for an Extended Spitzer Mission

Although the final observations of the Spitzer Warm Mission are currently scheduled for March 2019, it can continue operations through the end of the decade with no loss of photometric precision. As we will show, there is a strong science case for extending the current Warm Mission to December 2020. Spitzer has already made major impacts in the fields of exoplanets (including microlensing events), characterizing near Earth objects, enhancing our knowledge of nearby stars and brown dwarfs, understanding the properties and structure of our Milky Way galaxy, and deep wide-field extragalactic surveys to study galaxy birth and evolution. By extending Spitzer through 2020, it can continue to make ground-breaking discoveries in those fields, and provide crucial support to the NASA flagship missions JWST and WFIRST, as well as the upcoming TESS mission, and it will complement ground-based observations by LSST and the new large telescopes of the next decade. This scientific program addresses NASA's Science Mission Directive's objectives in astrophysics, which include discovering how the universe works, exploring how it began and evolved, and searching for life on planets around other stars.Comment: 75 pages. See page 3 for Table of Contents and page 4 for Executive Summar

Aperture Photometry Tool Versus SExtractor for Noncrowded Fields

Outputs from new software program Aperture Photometry Tool (APT) are compared with similar outputs from SExtractor for sources extracted from R-band optical images acquired by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), infrared mosaics constructed from Spitzer Space Telescope images, and a processed visible/near-infrared image from the Hubble Legacy Archive (HLA). Two large samples from the PTF images are studied, each containing around 3 × 10^3 sources from noncrowded fields. The median values of source-intensity relative percentage differences between the two software programs, computed separately for two PTF samples, are +0.13% and +0.17%, with corresponding statistical dispersions of 1.43% and 1.84%, respectively. For the Spitzer mosaics, a similar large sample of extracted sources for each of channels 1–4 of Spitzer’s Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) are analyzed with two different sky annulus sizes, and we find that the median and modal values of source-intensity relative percentage differences between the two software programs are between -0.5% and +2.0%, and the corresponding statistical dispersions range from 1.4 to 6.7%, depending on the Spitzer IRAC channel and sky annulus. The results for the HLA image are mixed, as might be expected for a moderately crowded field. The comparisons for the three different kinds of images show that there is generally excellent agreement between APT and SExtractor. Differences in source-intensity uncertainty estimates for the PTF images amount to less than 3% for the PTF sources, and these are potentially caused by SExtractor’s omission of the sky background uncertainty term in the formula for source-intensity uncertainty, as well as differing methods of sky background estimation

Aperture Photometry Tool Versus SExtractor for Noncrowded Fields

Outputs from new software program Aperture Photometry Tool (APT) are compared with similar outputs from SExtractor for sources extracted from R-band optical images acquired by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), infrared mosaics constructed from Spitzer Space Telescope images, and a processed visible/near-infrared image from the Hubble Legacy Archive (HLA). Two large samples from the PTF images are studied, each containing around 3 × 103 sources from noncrowded fields. The median values of source-intensity relative percentage differences between the two software programs, computed separately for two PTF samples, are þ0:13% and þ0:17%, with corresponding statistical dispersions of 1.43% and 1.84%, respectively. For the Spitzer mosaics, a similar large sample of extracted sources for each of channels 1–4 of Spitzer’s Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) are analyzed with two different sky annulus sizes, and we find that the median and modal values of source-intensity relative percentage differences between the two software programs are between �0:5% and þ2:0%, and the corresponding statistical dispersions range from 1.4 to 6.7%, depending on the Spitzer IRAC channel and sky annulus. The results for the HLA image are mixed, as might be expected for a moderately crowded field. The comparisons for the three different kinds of images show that there is generally excellent agreement between APT and SExtractor. Differences in source-intensity uncertainty estimates for the PTF images amount to less than 3% for the PTF sources, and these are potentially caused by SExtractor’s omission of the sky background uncertainty term in the formula for source-intensity uncertainty, as well as differing methods of sky background estimation