The best data will be those that have almost no interference from the halo at all. Those exposures, if they can be identified, will have the least scattered light on the DS and will therefore be the easiest to clean up. Here we try to identify those exposures. We simulate the effect of the halo on ideal images and measure the amount of flux added by the halo – before any attempts to remove it. We loop over relevant values of lunar phase and ‘alfa’, the PSF-width parameter. We calculate the change in flux for a region near the DS rim and express the change in percent. The contour plot shows contours at 1,2,4 etc percent change. Overplotted are red data points showing locations of real exposures.
We see that the least polluted images are found at large phase (near New Moon) and for narrow PSFs (large alfa values). This is not surprising! We see that we have several exposures taken under conditions that allow just 1,2,4 etc percent change in DS intensity.
If these images are the least polluted by BS-scattered light, we should have the most success when applying our scattered-light removal techniques to these. If they have a 10% effect due to scattered light, and we can remove 99% of that we have reduced the error induced by the BS halo to the 0.1% level.
