[Aavso-photometry] Cosmic Rays

[Ben Davies]

Michael,

You are thinking too much.  Did you make the dark frames and look at the 
cosmic ray hits?

As I said previously, I ignore single pixel anomalies.  If you actually 
look at the image you see that cosmic ray hits are very distinctive.  
They cover many adjacent pixels, fading from brighter to very faint.  In 
addition they are almost never scalars . You should instead be 
calculating the probability of that sort of structure occurring in a 
stochastic field.

What we are looking for are patterns and the human brain is very, very 
good at picking them out.  In a more limited, but also more precise way, 
software can be designed to do this also.

That was a very good exposition on sources of ccd noise.  Thanks for the 
summary.

Ben