Scintillation Reduction Method for Photometric Measurements

Abstract

We explore the reduction of scintillation via differencing signals from binary stars. Theory has been extended to include temporal and angular separation effects simultaneously. For meter-class telescopes, scintillation for a 2Љ binary is reduced by greater than a factor of 3. Aperture averaging for differential scintillation had a dependence for exposure times ≤0.25 s versus for absolute scintillation. For 1.5 m Ϫ1.4‫1.0ע‬ Ϫ1.1‫1.0ע‬ D D diameter telescopes, the influence of binary separation on differential scintillation for went as for 0.6 v ! 5 v instantaneous scintillation and rose slightly with exposure time. If the deconvolution problem can be solved, differencing signals from binary stars offers the potential for increased photometric accuracy.