Multi-aperture Photometry Pipeline for DEEP-South Data

We present a multi-aperture photometry pipeline for DEEP-South (Deep Ecliptic Patrol of the Southern Sky) time-series data, written in C. The pipeline is designed to do robust high-precision photometry and calibration of non-crowded fields with a varying point-spread function, allowing for the wholesale search and characterization of both temporal and spatial variabilities. Our time-series photometry method consists of three parts: (i) extracting all point sources with several pixel/blind parameters, (ii) determining the optimized aperture for each source where we consider whether the measured flux within the aperture is contaminated by unwanted artifacts, and (iii) correcting position-dependent variations in the PSF shape across the mosaic CCD. In order to provide faster access to the resultant catalogs, we also utilize an efficient indexing technique using compressed bitmap indices (FastBit). Lastly, we focus on the development and application of catalog-based searches that aid the identification of high-probable single events from the indexed database. This catalog-based approach is still useful to identify new point-sources or moving objects in non-crowded fields. The performance of the pipeline is being tested on various sets of time-series data available in several archives: DEEP-South asteroid survey and HAT-South/MMT exoplanet survey data sets.