About XMM-OM

The Newton X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM) was launched in December, 1999 with a projected lifetime of 10 years. Although intended primarily as an X-ray observatory, XMM included a small but powerful optical/UV 30 cm telescope co-aligned with the X-ray telescopes for contemporaneous observations. The modified Ritchey-Chretien telescope is capable of detecting 24th magnitude sources in its 17 arcmin field of view. It provides images in the 160-600nm wave band with 1 arcsec resolution.

MAST is serving a OM Mosaic product that uses a pipeline described by Kuntz et. al. OMCat: Catalog of Serendipitous Sources Detected with the XMM-Newton Optical Monitor PASP, 120:740-758

Please see discussion on Processing of OM Mosaics, excerpted from a draft of the paper.

The links below give more information on the optical detectors used. Users interested in XMM x-ray data should go to the ESA XMM-Newton Science Operations Center

• Optical Monitor Home page
• The XMM-Newton optical/UV monitor telescope Mason, K.O. et.al. A&A 365:36.
• The XMM Guest Observer Facility
• OM Calibration data
• SAS software for the analysis of OM data (notably the OMICHAIN task). The OM software is bundled with the analysis tools for the X-ray instruments.
• Users Guide (Chapter 6 describes the OM processing).