Image alignment, including defocused photometry

[James McCormac]

Hi,

We have a simple but powerful algorithm that was primarily developed for autoguiding telescopes on defocused stars. The method also works for autoguiding with well/undersampled images too. I've recently been using the same code to align the photometry apertures before defocused photometry with IRAF and was wondering if it would be useful for the community?  If so I could try to contribute it as an affiliated package.

The alignment is translational only and does not deal with rotation, but adding rotation could be investigated if it would be useful (we use equatorial telescopes - where rotation is not an issue - for our science). The method is a simple 2x 1D cross correlation, with CCF centroiding and it returns frame-to-frame centering with and RMS ~1/20 pixel (from our test data). You can find more info on our paper here:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?arXiv:1304.2405

Cheers

James 

[Steve Crawford]

Hi James--

I definitely think this would be something useful for the community as
it is something that does come up at both small and large
observatories. I'd encourage you to package the software, or
contribute it to the one of the existing packages. We would
definitely welcome something like this in ccdproc.

Cheers
Steve

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