Assessment of a pixel-to-pixel metrological approach to the measurement of astronomical magnitudes

This work provides a thorough insight into the performance of a new approach to the measurement of astronomical magnitudes. This new photometric procedure only considers as part of the source those pixels with a value higher than the sky background value within a specified confidence interval. The resultant procedure is robust, simple and fast, and it provides the instrumental magnitude and corresponding uncertainty for each celestial object within a CCD image. A numerical and observational comparison with the more traditional aperture photometry method is also presented.