We describe the drizzling pipeline and contents of the drizzled database for Hubble Space Telescope Cycle 27-29 Archival Legacy project "SKYSURF," the largest archival project ever approved for Hubble. SKYSURF aims to investigate the extragalactic background light using all 143,914 ACSWFC, WFC3UVIS, and WFC3IR images that have been taken by Hubble since its launch in 2002. SKYSURF has produced 38,027 single-visit mosaics and 7,893 multi-visit mosaics across 28 ACSWFC, WFC3UVIS, and WFC3IR filters using nonstandard drizzling methods, which include preserving the lowest sky-level of each visit/group in the drizzled products, applying wider apertures for cosmic-ray rejection, correcting effects caused by charge transfer efficiency degradation, and removing potential light gradients from input images via sky-map subtraction. We generate source catalogs for all drizzled products with SExtractor and provide updated star-galaxy separation parameters and integrated galaxy light (IGL) estimates for 25 of the 28 SKYSURF filters (wavelength range 0.2-1.7 um) using a novel IGL fitting method made possible by the vast SKYSURF dataset. We discuss the data processing and data analysis challenges encountered, detail our solutions, and offer suggestions that may facilitate future large-scale IGL investigations with Webb, SPHEREx, and Roman.
@article{arxiv.2507.05323,
title = {SKYSURF. X. A Novel Method for Measuring Integrated Galaxy Light},
author = {Delondrae D. Carter and Timothy Carleton and Daniel J. Henningsen and Rogier A. Windhorst and Seth H. Cohen and Scott A. Tompkins and Rosalia O'Brien and Anton M. Koekemoer and Juno Li and Zak Goisman and Simon P. Driver and Aaron S. G. Robotham and Rolf A. Jansen and Norman A. Grogin and Sabine Bellstedt and Haina Huang and Tejovrash Acharya and Jessica M. Berkheimer and Haley Abate and Connor Gelb and Isabela Huckabee and John MacKenty},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.05323},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Published in ApJS, 283, 21 (2026). Updated to match the final journal version