Flux reconstruction for the NIR camera CAGIRE at the focus of the Colibrí telescope

Abstract

CAGIRE is the near infrared camera of the Colibrí robotic telescope, designed for the follow-up of SVOM alerts, mainly Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs), and the quick imaging of sky regions where transient sources are detected by the SVOM satellite. CAGIRE is based on the Astronomical Large Format Array (ALFA) 2k x 2k SWIR sensor from the French consortium CEA-LYNRED. In the context of CAGIRE the sensor is operated in "Up the Ramp" mode to observe the sky in a square field of view of 21.7 arcmin on a side, in the range of wavelengths from 1.1 to 1.8 µm. An observation with CAGIRE consists of a series of short (1-2 minutes) exposures during which the pixels are read out every 1.3 second, continuously accumulating charges proportionally to the received flux, building a ramp.The main challenge is to quickly process and analyse these ramps, in order to identify and study the near infrared counterparts of the bursts, within 5 minutes of the reception of an alert. Our preprocessing, which is under development, aims at providing reliable flux maps for the astronomy pipeline. It is based on a sequence of operations. First, calibration maps are used to identify saturated pixels, and for each pixel, the usable (non saturated) range of the ramp. Then, the ramps are corrected for the electronic common mode noise, and differential ramps are constructed. Finally, the flux is calculated from the differential ramps, using a previously calibrated map of pixel non-linearities. We present here the sequence of operations performed by the preprocessing, which are based on previous calibrations of the sensor response. These operations lead to the production of a flux map corrected from cosmic-rays hits, a map depicting the quality of the fit, a map of saturated pixels and a map of pixels hit by cosmic-rays, before the acquisition of the next ramp. These maps will be used by the astronomy pipeline to quickly extract the scientific results of the observations, like the identification of uncatalogued or quickly variable sources that could be GRB afterglows.

COLIBRI, a wide-field 1.3 m robotic telescope dedicated to the transient sky

“…We will use ramp reads to improve dynamic range, mitigate radiation events, and reduce the read noise (Ref. 13).…”