INTEGRAL Picture Of the Month
May 2010

INTEGRAL POM
(Click to download full resolution)

INTEGRAL provides the sharpest view of the hard X-ray sky

The 9th release of the INTEGRAL Offline Scientific Analysis (OSA) package provides an improved software for the soft gamma-ray imager IBIS/ISGRI. The picture highlights the improvement of the image quality for a field centered on the black-hole candidate Cygnus X-1 (left panel).

The circular structures (middle panel) in the enhanced background image are artifacts related to the absorption of hard X-ray photons by the glue used to mount the instrument coded mask on its supporting structure. The intensity of these artifacts is of the order of 0.2% of that of the brightest source in the field of view. Thanks to an extensive in-flight calibration effort this glue could be modeled much better, reducing the artifacts by a factor of 10 (right panel).

In this image (right panel), new faint hard X-ray sources could be detected for the first time. The source in the green circle is two thousand times fainter than Cygnus X-1.

The OSA 9 software package is available at the INTEGRAL Science Data Centre ( http://www.isdc.unige.ch/integral/ ).

Pictures © Roland Walter/ISDC

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