Enabling Gaia observations of naked-eye stars
Abstract
The ESA Gaia space astrometry mission will perform an all-sky survey of stellar objects complete in the nominal magnitude range G = [6.0 - 20.0]. The stars with G lower than 6.0, i.e. those visible to the unaided human eye, would thus not be observed by Gaia. We present an algorithm configuration for the Gaia on-board autonomous object observation system that makes it possible to observe very bright stars with G = [2.0-6.0). Its performance has been tested during the in-orbit commissioning phase achieving an observation completeness of ~94% at G = 3 - 5.7 and ~75% at G = 2 - 3. Furthermore, two targeted observation techniques for data acquisition of stars brighter than G = 2.0 were tested. The capabilities of these two techniques and the results of the in-flight tests are presented. Although the astrometric performance for stars with G lower than 6.0 has yet to be established, it is clear that several science cases will benefit from the results of the work presented here.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1408.3039,
title = {Enabling Gaia observations of naked-eye stars},
author = {J. Martín-Fleitas and A. Mora and J. Sahlmann and R. Kohley and B. Massart and J. L'hermitte and M. Le Roy and P. Paulet},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.3039},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
12 pages, 5 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the SPIE 9143, 2014 Astronomical Instrumentation and Telescopes conference