Measurement of Apparent Magnitude and Effective Temperature with Amateur Telescopes

Abstract

In the present study, we developed algorithms that are capable of measuring apparent magnitudes and the effective temperature of stars using raw images shot with amateur telescopes. The regularized Radial Basis Function (RBF) network, one of the machine learning algorithms, was employed to measure the effective temperature, and the simple function fitting method was adopted to measure the apparent magnitude. The achieved results are satisfying. After the white balance and noise cancellation process was simply calibrated, it was demonstrated that the measurements of the effective temperature had mean fraction errors at around 9%, and the measurements of the magnitudes had absolute error at nearly 0.1.