Issue |
A&A
Volume 637, May 2020
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A85 | |
Number of page(s) | 25 | |
Section | Astronomical instrumentation | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201936908 | |
Published online | 20 May 2020 |
Spectrophotometric calibration of low-resolution spectra
Departament de Física Quàntica i Astrofísica, Institut de Ciències del Cosmos (ICCUB), Universitat de Barcelona (IEEC-UB), Martí i Franquès 1, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
e-mail: mweiler@fqa.ub.edu
Received:
12
October
2019
Accepted:
17
March
2020
Context. Low-resolution spectroscopy is a frequently used technique. Aperture prism spectroscopy in particular is an important tool for large-scale survey observations. The ongoing ESA space mission Gaia is the currently most relevant example.
Aims. In this work we analyse the fundamental limitations of the calibration of low-resolution spectrophotometric observations and introduce a calibration method that avoids simplifying assumptions on the smearing effects of the line spread functions.
Methods. To this aim, we developed a functional analytic mathematical formulation of the problem of spectrophotometric calibration. In this formulation, the calibration process can be described as a linear mapping between two suitably constructed Hilbert spaces, independently of the resolution of the spectrophotometric instrument.
Results. The presented calibration method can provide a formally unusual but precise calibration of low-resolution spectrophotometry with non-negligible widths of line spread functions. We used the Gaia spectrophotometric instruments to demonstrate that the calibration method of this work can potentially provide a significantly better calibration than methods neglecting the smearing effects of the line spread functions.
Key words: instrumentation: photometers / instrumentation: spectrographs / techniques: photometric / techniques: spectroscopic / methods: data analysis
© ESO 2020
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