Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes 4 – Conference Proceedings

Extracting accurate photometry (and astrometry) from images taken with adaptive optics assisted instruments isparticularly challenging. Current post-processing tools are not prepared to achieve high accuracy from AO data,especially in limiting cases of crowded elds and marginally resolved sources. We quantify the limitations of thesetools with synthetic images, and present a proof-of-concept study showing the potential of using reconstructedPSFs from the (GL)AO system telemetry to increase the measured photometric accuracy. We show that thephotometric accuracy is signicantly improved with a good PSF reconstruction in considerably crowded regions.We demonstrate the need for a dedicated post-processing tool that incorporates available information about thePSF, as well as the ability to adjust to the spatial variations of the PSF characteristic of AO data.