A new data analysis technique in the study of mutual event lightcurves

¹ Laboratorio de Astronomía y Geodesia, Departamento de Matemáticas, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Cádiz, 11510 Puerto Real, Cádiz, Spain e-mail: mariaeva.ramirez@uca.es
² Real Instituto y Observatorio de la Armada en San Fernando, c/Cecilio Pujazón s/n., 11110 San Fernando, Cádiz, Spain

Received: 9 June 2004
Accepted: 27 October 2005

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new methodology for analyzing astronomical data, in particular, one of the light curves obtained in the PHEMU campaign in 1997, where the mutual phenomena between Jupiter and its satellites were observed from the Earth due to the coincidence of the equatorial plane of Jupiter and the orbit plane of the Earth. The more specific aim of this study is to determine the times of the beginning and the end of the phenomena, and the moment when the recorded light flux was at a minimum.
The techniques we applied were based on the wavelet theory, which allows us to study a signal from its approximations and details at different scales. Before applying the designed algorithm to our experimental data, we considered a synthetic light curve in order to check the reliability of our method. It should be mentioned that the results are not relevant from the astronomical point of view, since no corrections for albedo or illumination were applied to the recorded data.