ARCO: a program for Automatic Reduction of CCD Observations

Abstract

The huge amount of CCD photometric data collected by robotic telescopes (as for instance the ICE-T telescope to be installed at Dome-C) requires a fully automated approach to the reduction and analysis procedures. To this end, we are developing a pipeline, making use of IRAF, DAOPHOTII and tasks build up by us, which will enable to automatically extract differential magnitude time series. Both aperture and PSF photometry methods are used to build a proper sample of comparison stars, with the best method between the two being automatically selected. Finally, the search of rotational periods is performed. To test our package, we present results obtained using a 4-year dataset of a field in the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC) containing about 350 stars (150 of which turned out to be periodic variables).