High-Speed and Wide-Field Photometry with TORTORA.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Astronomy Volume 2010, Article ID 268501, 8 pages doi:10.1155/2010/268501 Research Article High-Speed and Wide-Field Photometry with TORTORA G. Greco,1 G. Beskin,2 S. Karpov,2 S. Bondar,3 C. Bartolini,1 A. Guarnieri,1 and A. Piccioni1 1Astronomy Department, Bologna University, 40126 Bologna, Italy 2 Special Astrophysical Observatory of Russian Academy of Science, 369167 Nizhnij Arkhyz, Russia 3 Institute for Precise Instrumentation, 369167 Nizhnij Arkhyz, Russia Correspondence should be addressed to G. Greco, giuseppe.greco2@studio.unibo.it Received 8 July 2009; Accepted 24 September 2009 Academic Editor: Alberto J. Castro-Tirado Copyright © 2010 G. Greco et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We present the photometric analysis of the extended sky fields observed by the TORTORA optical monitoring system. The technology involved in the TORTORA camera is based on the use of a fast TV-CCD matrix with an image intensifier. This approach can both significantly reduce the readout noise and shorten the focal length following to monitor relatively large sky regions with high temporal resolution and adequate detection limit. The performance of the system has been tested using the relative magnitudes of standard stars by means of long image sequences collected at different airmasses and at various intensities of the moon illumination. As expected from the previous laboratory measurements, artifact sources are negligible and do not affect the photometric results. The following analysis is based on a large sample