This example demonstrates a data reduction process in which the optical lightcurve of the fastly rotating trans-Neptunian object (TNO), (20000) Varuna has been measured.
In this example we demonstrate how the tasks in the FITSH package can be exploited to create a color composite astronomical image from individual scientific frames. In principle, a nice colorful image requires low noise, so either we need long exposure frames or multiple images should be combined in order to obtain this sufficiently low noise level. Since both the guiding errors of the telescope mounts and the presence of the atmospheric refraction impede us from longer exposure times, we focus on now methods based on multiple image combination. Additionally, this method also has the advantage that small but explicit dithering in the telescope position allows us to reject bad pixels or flat errors from the final image by taking a median average of the individual frames.