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Published May 2014 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Seeing in the dark – I. Multi-epoch alchemy

Abstract

Weak lensing by large-scale structure is an invaluable cosmological tool given that most of the energy density of the concordance cosmology is invisible. Several large ground-based imaging surveys will attempt to measure this effect over the coming decade, but reliable control of the spurious lensing signal introduced by atmospheric turbulence and telescope optics remains a challenging problem. We address this challenge with a demonstration that point spread function (PSF) effects on measured galaxy shapes in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) can be corrected with existing analysis techniques. In this work, we co-add existing SDSS imaging on the equatorial stripe in order to build a data set with the statistical power to measure cosmic shear, while using a rounding kernel method to null out the effects of the anisotropic PSF. We build a galaxy catalogue from the combined imaging, characterize its photometric properties and show that the spurious shear remaining in this catalogue after the PSF correction is negligible compared to the expected cosmic shear signal. We identify a new source of systematic error in the shear–shear autocorrelations arising from selection biases related to masking. Finally, we discuss the circumstances in which this method is expected to be useful for upcoming ground-based surveys that have lensing as one of the science goals, and identify the systematic errors that can reduce its efficacy.

Additional Information

© 2014 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. First published online: March 23, 2014. Accepted 2014 January 17. Received 2014 January 16; in original form 2011 December 15. We thank Gary Bernstein, Alison Coil, Tim Eifler, Jim Gunn, Mike Jarvis, Alexie Leauthaud, Reiko Nakajima, Jeff Newman, Nikhil Padmanabhan and Barney Rowe for many useful discussions about this project.We also thank Kevin Bundy for allowing us to use preliminary versions of his UKIDSS-SDSS colour-matched catalogue. EMH is supported by the US Department of Energy's Office of High Energy Physics (DE-AC02-05CH11231). During the period of work on this paper, CH was supported by the US Department of Energy's Office of High Energy Physics (DE-FG03-02-ER40701 and DE-SC0006624), the US National Science Foundation (AST- 0807337), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the David & Lucile Packard Foundation. RM was supported for part of the duration of this project by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant #HSTHF-01199.02-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. US is supported by the DOE, the Swiss National Foundation under contract 200021-116696/1 and WCU grant R32-10130. Funding for the SDSS and SDSS-II has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The SDSS website is http://www.sdss.org/. The SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions. The Participating Institutions are the American Museum of Natural History, Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, University of Basel, University of Cambridge, Case Western Reserve University, University of Chicago, Drexel University, Fermilab, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, the Korean Scientist Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (LAMOST), Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), New Mexico State University, Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the United States Naval Observatory and the University of Washington.

Attached Files

Published - MNRAS-2014-Huff-1296-321.pdf

Submitted - 1111.6958v1.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
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October 26, 2023