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Jump to moving targets avoided by default, or known inertial bright objects you should avoid.

Solar System Objects Included in Bright Object Avoidance

No object (besides the Sun) poses a threat to instrument safety. However, an observer may wish to avoid observing the Earth and other bright moving objects to avoid compromising observations of faint targets. Therefore, the visibility windows calculated by the Spitzer planning tools avoid certain bright moving targets by default. The observer may choose to override the default (a) Earth/Moon or (b) other bright object avoidance. For example, to observe Jovian satellites, one would turn off (b) and leave (a) in effect.

  • Earth
  • Moon
  • Mars
  • Jupiter
  • Saturn
  • Uranus
  • Neptune
  • 4 Vesta
  • 6 Hebe
  • 1 Ceres
  • 7 Iris
  • 15 Eunomia
The observer can choose to override the default. It should be noted that it is the observer's responsibility to check for any bright inertial targets in the field of view that might compromise the observation, and there are some that will heavily saturate the instruments. A list of most of the objects known to saturate the instruments is available below.

Known inertial bright objects

Note that as of S13 (November 2005), (1) Spot can overlay these bright objects on visualizations, and (2) proposers need to justify observing these objects.

The SSC reserves the right to put a scheduling hold on AORs that may or may not be included on these lists as a result of impacts these bright objects would have on subsequent observations.

In assessing whether or not your particular object will saturate, or how far off the array(s) you should place the objects, Figures 4.3 and 4.4 in the SOM may be of help.

Bright Objects as of November 1, 2005 (S13)

Things to avoid while using...

These lists, and those accessed through Spot, may contain erroneous entries. It is the responsibility of the observer to visualize the bright source locations on corresponding images in Spot to verify the reality of the listed objects.

For IRAC, targets are subject to flagging as bright objects if they are within 10 arcmin of the center of an IRAC aperture. This distance is subject to change at any time.

For IRS the distances are:

  • IRS_Short-Lo_Module_Center: 0.018 deg (approx 66 arcsec)
  • other IRS_Short-Lo: 0.0106 deg (approx 38 arcsec)
  • IRS_Long-Lo_Module_Center: 0.0479 deg (approx 172 arcsec)
  • other IRS_Long-Lo: 0.0311 deg (approx 112 arcsec)
  • IRS_Short-Hi: 0.0022 deg (approx 8 arcsec)
  • IRS_Long-Hi: 0.0053 deg (approx 19 arcsec)
For MIPS, we look for any match between the MIPS field of view and these catalogs using the same underlying machinery as one uses to search the Archive using Leopard.

Previous lists

(many are the same as S13)

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This file was last modified on Mon Apr 21 16:19:07 2008.

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