Related papers: Difference imaging photometry of blended gravitati…
This is a preliminary report on the application of Difference Image Analysis (DIA) to galactic bulge images. The aim of this analysis is to increase the sensitivity to the detection of gravitational microlensing. We discuss how the DIA…
The MACHO collaboration has been carrying out Difference Image Analysis (DIA) since 1996 with the aim of increasing the sensitivity to the detection of gravitational microlensing. This is a preliminary report on the application of DIA to…
We investigate the effect of blending in future gravitational microlensing surveys by carrying out simulation of Galactic bulge microlensing events to be detected from a proposed space-based lensing survey. From this simulation, we find…
The gravitational fields of astrophysical bodies bend the light around them, creating multiple paths along which light from a distant source can arrive at Earth. Measuring the difference in photon arrival time along these different paths…
We present a new technique for monitoring microlensing activity even in highly crowded fields, and use this technique to place limits on low-mass MACHOs in the haloes of M31 and the Galaxy. Unlike present Galactic microlensing surveys, we…
Due to the choice of very dense star fields for a higher event rate, the current microlensing searches suffer from large uncertainties caused by blending effect. To measure light variations of microlensing events free from the effect of…
Microlensing light curves are now being monitored with the precision required to detect small perturbations due to planetary companions of the primary lens. Microlensing is complementary to other planetary search techniques in its potential…
The large number of microlensing events discovered towards the Galactic Bulge bears the promise to reconstruct the stellar mass function. The more interesting issue concerning the mass function is certainly to probe its low mass end.…
Difference imaging or image subtraction is a method that measures differential photometry by matching the pointing and point-spread function (PSF) between image frames. It is used for the detection of time-variable phenomena. Here we…
Detecting colour changes of a gravitational microlensing event induced by the limb-darkened extended source effect is important to obtain useful information both about the lens and source star. However, precise measurements of the colour…
We present a new method designed for optimal subtraction of two images with different seeing. Using image subtraction appears to be essential for the full analysis of the microlensing survey images, however a perfect subtraction of two…
I present an implementation of the difference image photometry based on the Alard & Lupton optimal PSF matching algorithm. The most important feature distinguishing this method from the ones using Fourier divisions is that equations are…
The image subtraction method is a powerful tool to analyze the light variations in crowded fields. This method is able to achieve a nearly optimal differential photometry, even in very dense regions. However, image subtraction is not…
Gravitational microlensing surveys target very dense stellar fields in the local group. As a consequence the microlensed source stars are often blended with nearby unresolved stars. The presence of `blending' is a cause of major uncertainty…
To improve photometric precision by removing blending effect, a newly developed technique of difference image analysis (DIA) is adopted by several gravitational microlensing experiment groups. However, the principal problem of the DIA…
We reexamine the usefulness of fitting blended lightcurve models to microlensing photometric data. We find agreement with previous workers (e.g. Wozniak & Paczynski) that this is a difficult proposition because of the degeneracy of blend…
When there is more than one source of light along the line of sight to a gravitationally lensed object, the characteristics of the observed light curve are influenced by the presence of the light that is not lensed. In this paper we develop…
Difference imaging is a technique for obtaining precise relative photometry of variable sources in crowded stellar fields and, as such, constitutes a crucial part of the data reduction pipeline in surveys for microlensing events or…
Currently, gravitational microlensing survey experiments toward the Galactic bulge field utilize two different methods of minimizing blending effect for the accurate determination of the optical depth \tau. One is measuring \tau based on…
GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing 2010 (GREAT10) is a public image analysis challenge aimed at the development of algorithms to analyze astronomical images. Specifically, the challenge is to measure varying image distortions in the…