CFHTLenS: The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey
Abstract
We present the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) that accurately determines a weak gravitational lensing signal from the full 154 square degrees of deep multi-colour data obtained by the CFHT Legacy Survey. Weak gravitational lensing by large-scale structure is widely recognised as one of the most powerful but technically challenging probes of cosmology. We outline the CFHTLenS analysis pipeline, describing how and why every step of the chain from the raw pixel data to the lensing shear and photometric redshift measurement has been revised and improved compared to previous analyses of a subset of the same data. We present a novel method to identify data which contributes a non-negligible contamination to our sample and quantify the required level of calibration for the survey. Through a series of cosmology-insensitive tests we demonstrate the robustness of the resulting cosmic shear signal, presenting a science-ready shear and photometric redshift catalogue for future exploitation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1210.0032,
title = {CFHTLenS: The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey},
author = {Catherine Heymans and Ludovic Van Waerbeke and Lance Miller and Thomas Erben and Hendrik Hildebrandt and Henk Hoekstra and Thomas D. Kitching and Yannick Mellier and Patrick Simon and Christopher Bonnett and Jean Coupon and Liping Fu and Joachim Harnois-D'eraps and Michael J. Hudson and Martin Kilbinger and Koenraad Kuijken and Barnaby Rowe and Tim Schrabback and Elisabetta Semboloni and Edo van Uitert and Sanaz Vafaei and Malin Velander},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.0032},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
MNRAS in press (accepted 15th August 2012), 21 pages with 12 figures. See http://www.cfhtlens.org for information about the upcoming CFHTLenS full data release