The Photon Statistics of Point Source Correlation Images in Coded Aperture Imaging

Abstract

We discuss continuous source images for coded aperture gamma-ray telescopes that employ a mask-antimask pair in conjunction with a continuous position sensitive detector. The images discussed are constructed by correlation of the measured mask-antimask differenced count rates with the expected point source response. Results are presented on flux and point source location errors for background dominated observations. These show the impact of the detector’s position resolution on the telescope’s flux sensitivity and source location accuracy. We also discuss the expected frequency of noise peaks of a given significance in the image.