Shengxian Yu, Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Rongyu Sun, Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Keywords: Sparse data, photometry, rotation period, light curve
Abstract:
From June 2017, the long-term photometry of a low orbit satellite is performed continuously with an optical network which consists of several small aperture optical telescopes, and the corresponding data is obtained. However, the precise photometry is seriously affected for a few reasons, e.g. the extremely short optical visibility time limits the span of the light curve (generally no more than one apparent rotation period) and makes it difficult to extract the apparent rotation period, the low altitude and high apparent brightness limit the exposure time for single image, and make it hard to measure the flux and find background stellar to perform astronomical calibration. Under the circumstances, most methods to derive the rotation curve period maybe invalid. Here we try to use several methods to derive the light curve, including fitting the sinusoidal function, phase dispersion minimization periodogram, epoch folding and so on. And then these results are compared to each other. By analyzing the derived rotation periods of the light curves at different time from June 2017 to March 2018, some preliminary conclusions are drawn.
Date of Conference: September 11-14, 2018
Track: Non-Resolved Object Characterization