Ground-Based CCD Astrometry with Wide Field Imagers. I. [Observations just a few years apart allow decontamination of field objects from members in two Globular clusters.]

TL;DR

This paper develops and applies a high-precision ground-based astrometry method using wide-field imagers, achieving milliarcsecond accuracy to distinguish cluster members from field stars in globular clusters.

Contribution

It introduces a new software adaptation for ground-based wide-field astrometry, characterizes geometric distortion, and demonstrates effective proper-motion measurements with archival data.

Findings

Achieved ~7 mas precision per coordinate in single exposures.

Successfully separated cluster members from field stars in M4 and NGC 6397.

Demonstrated the method's effectiveness with only 2.8-3.1 year baselines.

Abstract

This paper is the first of a series of papers in which we will apply the methods we have developed for high-precision astrometry (and photometry) with the Hubble Space Telescope to the case of wide-field ground-based images. In particular, we adapt the software originally developed for WFPC2 to ground-based, wide field images from the WFI at the ESO 2.2m telescope. In this paper, we describe in details the new software, we characterize the WFI geometric distortion, discuss the adopted local transformation approach for proper-motion measurements, and apply the new technique to two-epoch archive data of the two closest Galactic globular clusters: NGC 6121 (M4) and NGC 6397. The results of this exercise are more than encouraging. We find that we can achieve a precision of ~7 mas (in each coordinate) in a single exposure for a well-exposed star, which allows a very good cluster-field separation in both M4, and NGC 6397, with a temporal baseline of only 2.8, and 3.1 years, respectively.