A deconvolution method for accurate astrometry and photometry on adaptive optics images of stellar fields

We present a method to accurately find the position and photometry of each source in a stellar field blurred by the adaptive optics corrected point spread function (AO PSF). The method takes into account the specificities of the object (set of point sources whose accurate positions and amplitudes are sought) as well as the specificities of the AO PSF (sharp, finely sampled with a complex structure). The algorithm is based on the minimization in the Fourier domain of a regularized least square objective function using the Levenberg-Marquardt method. Astrometric and photometric data of each source are retrieved with an excellent accuracy and super-resolution (sub-pixel precision) is achieved. The performance of the method in terms of accuracy is assessed on simulated fields. Then, we present results obtained on images of the Galactic Center, a very crowded field on which the method shows remarkable robustness and stability.