• DOI:10.1117/12.2056325
• Corpus ID: 119112009

Enabling Gaia observations of naked-eye stars

@inproceedings{MartnFleitas2014EnablingGO,
  title={Enabling Gaia observations of naked-eye stars},
  author={Juan Manuel Mart{\'i}n-Fleitas and Johannes Sahlmann and Alcione Mora and Ralf Kohley and Beno{\^i}t Y. G. Massart and Julien L'Hermitte and Ma{\"i}wenn Le Roy and Pascal Paulet},
  booktitle={Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation},
  year={2014}
}

• J. Martín-Fleitas, J. Sahlmann, +5 authors P. Paulet
• Published in
  Astronomical Telescopes and…
  2 August 2014
• Physics

The ESA Gaia space astrometry mission will perform an all-sky survey of stellar objects complete in the nominal magnitude range G = [6.0 - 20.0]. The stars with G < 6.0, i.e. those visible to the unaided human eye, would thus not be observed by Gaia. We present an algorithm configuration for the Gaia on-board autonomous object observation system that makes it possible to observe very bright stars with G = [2.0-6.0). Its performance has been tested during the in-orbit commissioning phase achieving an observation completeness of ~ 94% at G = 3 – 5.7 and ~ 75% at G = 2 – 3. Furthermore, two targeted observation techniques for data acquisition of stars brighter than G=2.0 were tested. The capabilities of these two techniques and the results of the in-flight tests are presented. Although the astrometric performance for stars with G < 6.0 has yet to be established, it is clear that several science cases will benefit from the results of the work presented here.