Bibcode
Garcia, M. R.; Kong, A. K. H.; Primini, F. A.; McDowell, J.; Murray, S. S.
Bibliographical reference
American Astronomical Society, 198th AAS Meeting, #91.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 33, p.1178
Advertised on:
11
2001
Citations
1
Refereed citations
1
Description
In the pipeline processing of Chandra data, a uniform random blur,
currently defaulted to +/- 0.5 pixels, is added to the sky coordinate of
ACIS data. Its primary objective is to remove artificial components
which may be introduced by the aspect solution in this undersampled data
and hence improve the PSF. However, one can also point out that the
0.5-pixel randomization will decrease the overall PSF simply because it
degrades the original PSF. In our observations of the central region of
M31 which consists of 7 separated ( ~ 5 ksec for each) pointings, we
show that by removing pixel randomization, the spatial resolution is
actually improved in the stacked deep image. Moreover, due to the
improved PSF, the signal-to-noise ratio of faint sources is also
increased. Therefore, for similar kinds of observations which consist of
multiple short exposure pointings where spatial resolution becomes
important, pixel randomization should be omitted, and the results should
compare to those with randomization. In the meeting, we will present the
results of our M31 observations obtained by the two methods and compare
their differences.