An assessment of far-infrared measurements and their processing

Abstract

Three image processing schemes, used for generating far-infrared (FIR) astronomical maps have been compared for their relative merits. Two of these schemes based on the maximum entropy method (MEM) have been developed at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and the third method, High Resolution, viz, 'HiRes' is an Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) product. The data obtained from the TIFR 1m balloon-borne FIR telescope (TBBFT) as well as the survey detectors of the IRAS satellite have been used. The main conclusions are: deconvolved FIR maps obtained by TBBFT, with relatively smaller field of vision (FOV), achieve the best angular resolution; MEM deconvolution of IRAS additional observations (AOs) achieves resolution comparable to that of HiRes, with less than one fourth amount of computation, although with limited dynamic range.