Pan-STARRS Pixel Processing: Detrending, Warping, Stacking

TL;DR

This paper details the image processing pipeline for Pan-STARRS1, including detrending, warping, and stacking, to produce uniform, high-quality astronomical images from a large, multi-readout camera system.

Contribution

It introduces the comprehensive image processing methods used for Pan-STARRS1 data, including instrumental correction, image alignment, and stacking techniques, for the first public data release.

Findings

Effective correction of instrumental effects

High-quality, uniform sky images produced

Large dataset successfully processed

Abstract

The Pan-STARRS1 Science Consortium have carried out a set of imaging surveys using the 1.4 giga-pixel GPC1 camera on the PS1 telescope. As this camera is composed of many individual electronic readouts, and covers a very large field of view, great care was taken to ensure that the many instrumental effects were corrected to produce the most uniform detector response possible. We present the image detrending steps used as part of the processing of the data contained within the public release of the Pan-STARRS1 Data Release 1 (DR1). In addition to the single image processing, the methods used to transform the 375,573 individual exposures into a common sky-oriented grid are discussed, as well as those used to produce both the image stack and difference combination products.