The Large Array Survey Telescope—Pipeline. I. Basic Image Reduction and Visit Coaddition

Abstract

The Large Array Survey Telescope (LAST) is a wide-field telescope designed to explore the variable and transient sky with a high cadence and to be a test-bed for cost-effective telescope design. A LAST node is composed of 48 (32 already deployed), 28 cm f/2.2 telescopes. A single telescope has a 7.4 deg² field of view and reaches a 5σ limiting magnitude of 19.6 (21.0) in 20 (20 × 20) s (filter-less), while the entire system provides a 355 deg² field of view. The basic strategy of LAST is to obtain multiple 20 s consecutive exposures of each field (a visit). Each telescope carries a 61 Mpix camera, and the system produces, on average, about 2.2 Gbit s⁻¹. This high data rate is analyzed in near real-time at the observatory site, using limited computing resources (about 700 cores). Given this high data rate, we have developed a new, efficient data reduction and analysis pipeline. The LAST data pipeline includes two major parts: (i) Processing and calibration of single images, followed by a coaddition of the visit’s exposures. (ii) Building the reference images and performing image subtraction and transient detection. Here we describe in detail the first part of the pipeline. Among the products of this pipeline are photometrically and astrometrically calibrated single and coadded images, 32 bit mask images marking a wide variety of problems and states of each pixel, source catalogs built from individual and coadded images, Point-Spread Function photometry, merged source catalogs, proper motion and variability indicators, minor planets detection, calibrated light curves, and matching with external catalogs. The entire pipeline code is made public. Finally, we demonstrate the pipeline performance on real data taken by LAST.