Direct Estimate of Cirrus Noise in Herschel Hi-GAL Images
  In Herschel images of the Galactic plane and many star forming regions, a
major factor limiting our ability to extract faint compact sources is cirrus
confusion noise, operationally defined as the "statistical error to be expected
in photometric measurements due to confusion in a background of fluctuating
surface brightness". The histogram of the flux densities of extracted sources
shows a distinctive faint-end cutoff below which the catalog suffers from
incompleteness and the flux densities become unreliable. This empirical cutoff
should be closely related to the estimated cirrus noise and we show that this
is the case. We compute the cirrus noise directly, both on Herschel images from
which the bright sources have been removed and on simulated images of cirrus
with statistically similar fluctuations. We connect these direct estimates with
those from power spectrum analysis, which has been used extensively to predict
the cirrus noise and provides insight into how it depends on various
statistical properties and photometric operational parameters. We report
multi-wavelength power spectra of diffuse Galactic dust emission from Hi-GAL
observations at 70 to 500 microns within Galactic plane fields at l= 30 degrees
and l= 59 degrees. We find that the exponent of the power spectrum is about -3.
At 250 microns, the amplitude of the power spectrum increases roughly as the
square of the median brightness of the map and so the expected cirrus noise
scales linearly with the median brightness. Generally, the confusion noise will
be a worse problem at longer wavelengths, because of the combination of lower
angular resolution and the rising power spectrum of cirrus toward lower spatial
frequencies, but the photometric signal to noise will also depend on the
relative spectral energy distribution of the source compared to the cirrus.
