Centering algorithm of an unresolved primary and satellite system

Abstract

Affected by the Earth’s atmosphere, the image of a primary and satellite system may appear unresolved, such as the dwarf planet Haumea system. It is found by experiments that neither the two-dimensional Gaussian nor modified moment centering algorithms can accurately measure the photocenter of an image of unresolved primary and satellite system observed. This work investigates a specific centering algorithm to accurately measure the photocenter, which would be helpful to derive some physical parameters (e.g. orbital parameters and mass). Taking the dwarf planet Haumea and its brighter satellite Hi’iaka as an example, we simulate the motion of the photocenter with different seeings. We find that the photocenter of system changes significantly with seeings (∼0.074″ with the different seeings of 1″ and 3″) when using the two-dimensional Gaussian centering algorithm. However, the modified moment centering algorithm can accurately measure the photocenter of system without noises, but when noises are added its accuracy will be greatly influenced by noises. In this work, a new centering algorithm is proposed, which can accurately measure the photocenter with less influence of seeings and noises. Observations of dwarf planet Haumea taken over 25 nights are used to test the effectiveness of our proposed method. Compared with using two-dimensional Gaussian centering algorithm, the fitted parameter is slightly more accurate with less positional fitting errors when using the proposed method in this work. This method can also be applied to the centering of binary stars.