Journal Article

Scanamorphos: A Map-making Software for Herschel and Similar Scanning Bolometer Arrays

Roussel, H.

2013

Overview

Scanamorphos is public software available to postprocess scan observations performed with the Herschel photometer arrays. This postprocessing mainly consists in subtracting the total low-frequency noise (both its thermal and nonthermal components), masking high-frequency artefacts such as cosmic ray hits, and projecting the data onto a map. Although it was developed for Herschel, it is also applicable with minimal adjustment to scan observations made with some other imaging arrays subjected to low-frequency noise, provided they entail sufficient redundancy; it was successfully applied to P-Artémis, an instrument operating on the APEX telescope. Contrary to matrix-inversion softwares and high-pass filters, Scanamorphos does not assume any particular noise model, and does not apply any Fourier-space filtering to the data, but is an empirical tool using purely the redundancy built in the observations-taking advantage of the fact that each portion of the sky is sampled at multiple times by multiple bolometers. It is an interactive software in the sense that the user is allowed to optionally visualize and control results at each intermediate step, but the processing is fully automated. This paper describes the principles and algorithm of Scanamorphos and presents several examples of application.

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press,Astronomical Society of the Pacific
• Subject: Astronomical maps / Bolometers / Calibration / Computer software / Pipelines / Pixels / Sciences of the Universe / Signal noise / Spectral energy distribution / White noise