ESTIMATING THE CRAMER-RAO BOUND FOR RESTORED ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATIONS

This work addresses the problem of assigning confidence intervals to e stimated photometry data obtained from astronomical observations. The proposed solution is to estimate the Cramer-Rao bound, which is an ana lytical expression that describes the minimum obtainable mean square e rror associated with a given estimate of a parameter. This Letter pres ents a compact and simple form for the bound associated with a linear estimator such as a Wiener filter estimator. A prescription for estima ting the variance associated with each element in a restored object wa s developed using an analytical model for observed data corrupted by e ither Poisson or Gaussian noise. Both one- and two-dimensional example s are presented.