Television photometry: The Mariner 9 experience

Abstract Television photometry is compared to conventional techniques. Reduced data from the Mariner 9 cameras should, under optimum conditions, have been accurate to a few percent. However, a combination of unstable camera properties and various unfortunate circumstances (see Appendix A) produced serious nonlinearities (typically 20–40%) and other systematic errors. The means of estimating these errors are described in detail; they lean heavily on the fortuitous presence of a few specks of dust on the faceplate of one vidicon (see Appendix B). Crude corrections, shown in Figs. 2 and 4, will (if applied by hand to “reduced” data) probably improve the photometric quality from that of the Bonner Durchmusterung to nearly that of the Revised Harvard Photometry, for the two most-used filter positions of the A camera. It would be very difficult to improve the photometry further (Appendix C). In view of their low photometric accuracy and detective quantum efficiency (Appendix D), vidicons do not seem likely to replace conventional photography, except for special applications.

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