Improved Photometry for the DASCH Pipeline

Abstract

The Digital Access to a Sky Century@Harvard (DASCH) project is digitizing the ∼500,000 glass plate images obtained (full sky) by the Harvard College Observatory from 1885 to 1992. Astrometry and photometry for each resolved object are derived with photometric rms values of ∼0.15 mag for the initial photometry analysis pipeline. Here we describe new developments for DASCH photometry, applied to the Kepler field, that have yielded further improvements, including better identification of image blends and plate defects by measuring image profiles and astrometric deviations. A local calibration procedure using nearby stars in a similar magnitude range as the program star (similar to what has been done for visual photometry from the plates) yields additional improvement for a net photometric rms of ∼0.1 mag. We also describe statistical measures of light curves that are now used in the DASCH pipeline processing to identify new variables autonomously. The DASCH photometry methods described here are used in the pipeline processing for the data releases of DASCH data, as well as for a forthcoming paper on the long-term variables discovered by DASCH in the Kepler field.