The TAOS Project: High-Speed Crowded Field Aperture Photometry

Abstract

We have devised an aperture photometry pipeline for data reduction of image data from the
\nTaiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS). The photometry pipeline has high computational performance,
\nand is capable of real-time photometric reduction of images containing up to 1000 stars, within the sampling rate of
\n5 Hz. The pipeline is optimized for both speed and signal-to-noise performance, and in the latter category it performs
\nnearly as well as DAOPHOT. This paper provides a detailed description of the TAOS aperture photometry pipeline.