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Automated recovery of flux in saturated central pixels

Develop an automated, robust procedure to estimate the flux in pixels that saturate on the first readout in bright galaxy centers in JWST MIRI and NIRCam imaging—such as via curve-of-growth analysis or PSF fitting—so that central pixels in PHANGS-JWST mosaics have reliable measured flux values.

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Background

In some PHANGS-JWST observations, the brightest central regions saturate immediately, rendering a number of pixels unrecoverable by default processing. While techniques like curve-of-growth or PSF-fitting may enable flux recovery, the authors report that a robust and automated solution is not yet available, leaving gaps in central flux measurements.

References

However, we have not yet developed a robust, automated solution for this and so in some cases, a number of central pixels do not have measured flux values.

— PHANGS-JWST: Data Processing Pipeline and First Full Public Data Release (2401.15142 - Williams et al., 26 Jan 2024) in Section 4.3, Quality Assurance and Outstanding Issues; Subsubsection "PSF spikes and saturation in bright galaxy centers"