2023/05/02 by A. S. G. Robotham, J. C. J. D'Silva, Robotham, A. S. G. +13 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · Engineering · #Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing #Calibration and Measurement Techniques #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.01175
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) near-infrared camera (NIRCam) has been found to exhibit serious wisp-like structures in four of its eight short-wavelength detectors. The exact structure and strength of these wisps is highly variable with the position and orientation of JWST, so the use of static templates is non-optimal. Here we investigate a dynamic strategy to mitigate these wisps using long-wavelength reference images. Based on a suite of experiments where we embed a worst-case scenario median-stacked wisp into wisp-free images, we define suitable parameters for our wisp removal strategy. Using this setup we re-process wisp-affected public Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) data in the North Ecliptic Pole Time Domain Field (NEP-TDF), resulting in significant visual improvement in our detector frames and reduced noise in the final stacked images.