Spitzer Documentation & Tools

IRAC High Precision Photometry

  • box_centroider.pro : Calculates centroids for a source using a simple 1st moment box centroider

  • pmap_correct.pro. This package corrects for intrapixel gain variations in warm IRAC photometry. It performs a kernel regression on measured centroids and aperture photometry using a pixel mapping dataset taken on a calibration star. Because of the nearest neighbor calculation, it can be slow for large datasets, but is much more accurate than iracpc_pmap_corr (see below).

  • make_parallax_coords.pro: IDL procedure to calculate source coordinates as seen by an observatory, correcting for annual parallax and proper motion

  • pick_pcrs_catalog.pro : This code gives the user more information about available PCRS peakup catalog stars. It is intended to be used in conjunction with Spot where the catalog stars must be chosen for observations.

  • exoplanet_SNR.pro : This code calculates the predicted SNR of a transit given the 2MASS K band magnitude of the source, the spectral type of the source, the IRAC channel of interest, and the depth of the transit.

  • check_peakup_AORS : A perl script that analyzes IRAC staring mode AORs with PCRS peakup and produces a summary table that may be helpful in following best practices for precision photometry.

  • snirac_warm.pro : Calculates S/N for IRAC, including the Poisson noise contirbution of the target for warm IRAC observations.

  • irac_transformtosweet.pro: This code will calculate the offsets to be entered into Spot fixed cluster target offsets when transforming coordinates from an observed position using guide-star peak-up to the sweet spot position.

  • iracpc_pmap_corr.pro : Correct IRAC observed aperture photometry-derived fluxes from the post-cryogenic, or warm mission (IRACPC) for the intra-pixel response, using the (pre-gridded) pixel maps of the 3.6 micron (channel 1) and 4.5 micron (channel 2) subarray “sweet spots”. Note: This uses a pre-gridded pmap. It is faster, but less accurate than, pmap_correct (above).

  • irac_aphot_corr: Corrects IRAC observed aperture photometry-derived fluxes for the pixel phase and array location dependent response functions. Built-in corrections are available for data from both the cryogenic (S18.24 processing; keyword /CRYO) and post-cryogenic (S19.2 processing; keyword /WARM) missions. Note: this parametrized function for the intra-pixel response is a rough approximation and does not replicate the structure of the gain on less than 0.1 pixel scales. It may be useful as a first pass in correcting photometry.


To submit code to this repository, send email to:  help@spitzer.caltech.edu