Improved Point Source Detection in Crowded Fields using Probabilistic Cataloging

by Stephen Portillo (Harvard)

Tuesday 16 Jan 2018, 11:00 → 12:00 US/Eastern

small seminar room (BNL)

Cataloging is challenging in crowded fields because sources are extremely covariant with their neighbors and blending makes even the number of sources ambiguous. We present the first optical probabilistic stellar catalogue, cataloguing a crowded (~0.1 sources per pixel) SDSS r band image from M2. We show that our probabilistic catalogue goes more than a magnitude deeper than the DAOPHOT while having a lower false discovery rate brighter than 20th magnitude. We detail our efforts to speed up the method and extend it to galaxies, making probabilistic cataloguing applicable to the data that will be collected in the LSST era.