Related papers: Chromatic CCD effects on weak lensing measurements…
We identify and study a previously unknown systematic effect on cosmic shear measurements, caused by the selection of galaxies used for shape measurement, in particular the rejection of close (blended) galaxy pairs. We use ray-tracing…
An undersampled point spread function may interact with the microstructure of a solid-state detector such that the total flux detected can depend sensitively on where the PSF center falls within a pixel. Such intra-pixel sensitivity…
Photometric galaxy surveys, despite their limited resolution along the line of sight, encode rich information about the large-scale structure (LSS) of the Universe thanks to the high number density and extensive depth of the data. However,…
Telescope Point Spread Function (PSF) quality is critical for realising the potential of cosmic weak lensing observations to constrain dark energy and test General Relativity. In this paper we use quantitative weak gravitational lensing…
In Stage-IV imaging surveys, a significant amount of the cosmologically useful information is due to sources whose images overlap with those of other sources on the sky. The cosmic shear signal is primarily encoded in the estimated shapes…
We investigate the ellipticity of the point-spread function (PSF) produced by imaging an unresolved source with a telescope, subject to the effects of atmospheric turbulence. It is important to quantify these effects in order to understand…
We have undertaken a Near-IR Weak Lensing (NIRWL) analysis of the wide-field CANDELS HST/WFC3-IR F160W observations. With the Gaia proper-motion-corrected catalog as an astrometric reference, we updated the astrometry of the five CANDELS…
The tilt, rotation, or offset of each CCD with respect to the focal plane, as well as the distortion of the focal plane itself, cause shape distortions to the observed objects, an effect typically known as field distortion (FD). We point…
Residual errors in shear measurements, after corrections for instrument systematics and atmospheric effects, can impact cosmological parameters derived from weak lensing observations. Here we combine convergence maps from our suite of…
We present a method for removal of the contaminating effects of intrinsic galaxy alignments, in measurements of cosmic shear from multi-colour weak lensing surveys. The method down-weights pairs which are likely to be close in three…
Anisotropy in the point spread function (PSF) contributes a systematic error to weak lensing measurements. In this study we use a ray tracer that incorporates all the optical elements of the SNAP telescope to estimate this effect.…
In this paper we describe a detailed analysis of the photometric uncertainties present within the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) imaging survey based on repeat observations of approximately 200 square degrees of the sky. We show that, for…
We present a new shear estimator for weak lensing observations which properly accounts for the effects of a realistic point spread function (PSF). Images of faint galaxies are subject to gravitational shearing followed by smearing with the…
Neglecting the second order corrections in weak lensing measurements can lead to a few percent uncertainties on cosmic shears, and becomes more important for cluster lensing mass reconstructions. Existing methods which claim to measure the…
The ambitious goals of precision cosmology with wide-field optical surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) demand, as their foundation, precision CCD astronomy. This in turn requires an…
We show that dust absorption in disk galaxies leads to a color- and orientation-dependent centroid shift which is expected to be observable in multi-band imaging surveys. This centroid shift is an interesting new probe which contains…
An accurate model of the point spread function is required in order to estimate positions and brightnesses of stars in digitized images. The PSF of the Gaia space telescope is unusual due to the use of drift-scan mode and time-delayed…
Spectroscopic redshift errors, including redshift uncertainty and catastrophic failures, can bias cosmological measurements from galaxy redshift surveys at sub-percent level. In this work, we investigate their impact on the full-shape…
We use empirical star formation histories (SFHs), measured from HST-based resolved star color-magnitude diagrams, as input into population synthesis codes to model the broadband spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of ~50 nearby dwarf…
The weak distortions produced by gravitational lensing in the images of background galaxies provide a method to measure directly the distribution of mass in the universe. However this technique requires high precision measurements of the…