Purpose

The goal of these simulations is to estimate photometric and astrometric accuracy, and completeness and reliability of the 2MASS survey and the protocamera database. We will be testing the integrity of the kamphot processor under a number of varying conditions, including stellar density (from the galactic plane to the pole), seeing, background, sub-pixel response and bad pixel masks. We will compare the kamphot results with similar results found using a simple aperture photometry technique.

There are two primary tasks that the simulator performs:

• Generate a set of frames with the characteristics of the 2mass survey (e.g., background, poisson noise, read noise, frame-to-frame offset, diagonal dithering, etc), with stars randomly distributed in the field.

• Determine frame to frame offsets, build the ``local" point spread function, and perform kamphot psf-fitting photometry and single aperture photometry.