Outlier magnitudes in the Solar System First Look MPC Reported Detections

Support Data Products
#1

Thanks for the notebooks to parse the First Look Solar System detections reported to the Minor Planet Center (MPC). I’m finally get a chance to poke at the Solar System data products/released data while on the plane to the RCW.

I think this likely a question for @mjuric . I’ve been parsing through the First LOOK MPC data. I’ve found a few very deviant photometric points with huge error bar (4 out of 343760 photometric measurements that jump out because they are well beyond the expected limiting magnitude). I was wondering if it’s known what happened with the observations? Bad observing conditions or something going on with the calibration? The photometric quality of this dataset is fantastic, so I’m really asking more out of curiosity because I would take a look at the images if this was in DP1.

Here’s all the apparent mags report in all filters (roughly characterized by orbit) in the First Look reported observations in a box/whisker.

box_whisker_all_mags_open
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I looked at which objects those belong to and plotted the light curve - Here’s 3 of the 4:

Figure 14
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Figure 12
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Figure 13
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Thanks!

#2

I should have labeled axes - looks like it didn’t save (bottom is magnitude versus mjd )

#3

Hi Meg, not sure if its related but I had been looking into this for DP1 and also noticed the occasional significantly outlying photometric measurement. Here’s a notebook with some examples.

Looks like most of the outliers had flags for dipoleFitAttempted and/or shape_flag. I also tried looking at the difference in apFlux, psfFlux, trailFlux and found that the aperture measurement had the greatest photometric outliers. I had started looking at a couple of these sources and they did appear to be slightly trailed and/or faint and fuzzy. So I wonder if this means that not all the flux is fully captured for these sources, especially for an aperture measurement?