Photometry (astronomy)

Photometry is a technique of astronomy concerned with measuring the flux, or intensity of an astronomical object's electromagnetic radiation. When photometry is performed over broad wavelength bands of radiation, where not only the amount of radiation but also its spectral distribution is measured, the term spectrophotometry is used.

The word is composed of the Greek affixes ("light") and ("measure").

The methods used to perform photometry depend on the wavelength regime under study. At its most basic, photometry is conducted by gathering light in a telescope, sometimes passing it through specialized photometric optical bandpass filters, and then capturing and recording the light energy with a photosensitive instrument. Standard sets of passbands (called a photometric system) are defined to allow accurate comparison of observations.

Historically, photometry in the near-infrared through long-wavelength ultra-violet was done with a photoelectric photometer, an instrument that measured the light intensity of a single object by directing its light onto a photosensitive cell. These have largely been replaced with CCD cameras that can simultaneously image multiple objects, although photoelectric photometers are still used in special situations, such as where fine time resolution is required.

A CCD camera is essentially a grid of photometers, simultaneously measuring and recording the photons coming from all the sources in the field of view. Because each CCD image records the photometry of multiple objects at once, various forms of photometric extraction can be performed on the recorded data; typically relative, absolute, and differential. All three will require the extraction of the raw image magnitude of the target object, and a known comparison object. The observed signal from an object will typically cover many pixels according to the point spread function (PSF) of the system. This broadening is due to both the optics in the telescope and the astronomical seeing. When obtaining photometry from a point source, the flux is measured by summing all the light recorded from the object and subtract the light due to the sky. The simplest technique, known as aperture photometry, consists of summing the pixel counts within an aperture centered on the object and subtracting the product of the nearby average sky count per pixel and the number of pixels within the aperture. This will result in the raw flux value of the target object. When doing photometry in a very crowded field, such as a globular cluster, where the profiles of stars overlap significantly, one must use de-blending techniques, such as PSF fitting to determine the individual flux values of the overlapping sources.

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