Further calibration of the Swift ultraviolet/optical telescope

By A. Breeveld, P. Curran, E. Hoversten, S. Koch, Wayne B. Landsman, F. Marshall, M. Page, T. Poole, P. Roming, P. Smith and 25 more. 2010

214 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) is one of three instruments onboard the Swift observatory. The photometric calibration has been published, and this paper follows up with details on other aspects of the calibration including a measurement of the point spread function with an assessment of the orbital variation and the effect on photometry. A correction for large-scale variations in sensitivity over the field of view is described, as well as a model of the coincidence loss which is used to assess the coincidence correction in extended regions. We have provided a correction for the detector distortion and measured the resulting internal astrometric accuracy of the UVOT, also giving the absolute accuracy with respect to the International Celestial Reference System. We have compiled statistics on the background count rates, and discuss the sources of the background, including instrumental scattered light. In each case, we describe any impact on UVOT measurements, whether any correction is applied in the standard pipeline data processing or whether further steps are recommended.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f4b8ad688e628052946aeb2a5551501a75a735f

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Citations in the corpus

Six months of multiwavelength follow-up of the tidal disruption candidate asassn-14li and implied tde rates from asas-sn (2015, methodology): “We then used the most recent UVOT calibrations (Poole et al. 2008; Breeveld et al. 2010) to convert these count rates into magnitudes and fluxes.”
ASASSN-15oi: a rapidly evolving, luminous tidal disruption event at 216 Mpc (2016, methodology): “′′0 radius region using the UVOT software task uvotsource and converted these count rates into magnitudes and fluxes using the most recent UVOT calibrations (Poole et al. 2008; Breeveld et al. 2010).”
SPACE TELESCOPE AND OPTICAL REVERBERATION MAPPING PROJECT. II. SWIFT AND HST REVERBERATION MAPPING OF THE ACCRETION DISK OF NGC 5548 (2015, unknown): “…which either the average PSF Full width at half maximum (FWHM) differed by more than 1.0 arcsec from the nominal UVOT FWHM (2.2–2.9 arcsec depending upon the filter, Breeveld et al. 2010) or the average FWHM of the stellar PSF projections along the X and Y axes differed by more than 0.75 arcsec.”
AN ATLAS OF GALAXY SPECTRAL ENERGY DISTRIBUTIONS FROM THE ULTRAVIOLET TO THE MID-INFRARED (2013, methodology): “Swift UVOT photometry was calibrated using 10′′ diameter aperture photometry (without corrections for flux beyond the aperture) and we correct for this using approximations to the curves of growth presented in Breeveld et al. (2010).”
SOUSA: the Swift Optical/Ultraviolet Supernova Archive (2014, methodology): “The coincidence loss from a flat, extended source was studied in Breeveld et al. (2010) but is not known for the case of a structured background like a galaxy.”
A Multimessenger Picture of the Flaring Blazar TXS 0506+056: Implications for High-energy Neutrino Emission and Cosmic-Ray Acceleration (2018, methodology): “UVOTSOURCE does aperture photometry (Breeveld et al. 2010, 2011) using user-specified source and background regions.”
The diversity of Type II supernova versus the similarity in their progenitors (2016, methodology): “Details about the pipeline can be found in Appendix B. Swift aperture photometry was computed following the prescriptions described by Brown et al. (2009), but using the updated zeropoints of Breeveld et al. (2010).”
ASASSN-14ae: a tidal disruption event at 200 Mpc (2014, methodology): “The UVOT count rates were converted into magnitudes and fluxes based on the most recent UVOT calibration (Poole et al. 2008; Breeveld et al. 2010).”