Commissioning of a Commercial CMOS Camera for the Application of Lucky Image Technique on the Lulin One-meter Telescope

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the Lucky Image technique can be effectively applied to a 1-meter telescope using a commercial CMOS camera, improving image resolution and source detection accuracy.

Contribution

The study introduces a method to apply Lucky Image processing with a commercial CMOS camera on a 1-meter telescope, achieving near diffraction-limit resolution.

Findings

Achieved 1.7x FWHM improvement over conventional images.

Successfully matched sources with Gaia DR3 with minimal positional difference.

Reached a Gaia G-band magnitude depth of approximately 17.9 mag.

Abstract

Lucky image (LI) is a technique to achieve near diffraction-limit high-angular resolution images for meter-class optical telescopes. In this work, by observing the core of globular cluster M15, we demonstrated the LI technique can be applied to a 1-meter telescope, the Lulin One-meter Telescope (LOT), together with a commercial-grade CMOS camera. We have also developed a method to sort the quality of the LI frames by measuring the mean intensity per pixel on the selected reference stars. For a LI-reconstructed image based on the best 10\%-selected frames, we achieved a $1.7\times$ improvement on the full-width at half-maximum over the conventional long-exposure image. When cross-matched the detected sources on the LI-reconstructed image to the Gaia Data Release 3 catalog, we obtained a mean difference of $-0.04\pm0.09$" and $-0.02\pm0.09$" on the right ascension and declination, respectively, as well as reaching to a $5\sigma$ depth of $\sim 17.9$ mag in the Gaia $G$-band.