Correcting systematic effects in a large set of photometric light curves

Abstract

We suggest a new algorithm to remove systematic effects in a large set of lightcurves obtained by a photometric survey. The algorithm can remove systematic effects, like the ones associated with atmospheric extinction, detector efficiency, or PSF changes over the detector. The algorithm works without any prior knowledge of the effects, as long as they linearly appear in many stars of the sample. The approach, which was originally developed to remove atmospheric extinction effects, is based on a lower rank approximation of matrices, an approach which was already suggested and used in chemometrics, for example. The proposed algorithm is specially useful in cases where the uncertainties of the measurements are unequal. For equal uncertainties the algorithm reduces to the Principal Components Analysis (PCA) algorithm. We present a simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and point out its potential, in search for transit candidates in particular.