Related papers: The Brighter-Fatter and other Sensor Effects in CC…
Reduction of images and science analysis from ground-based telescopes such as the LSST requires detailed knowledge of the PSF of the image, which includes components attributable to the instrument as well as components attributable to the…
The brighter-fatter effect affects all CCD sensors to various degrees. Deep-depleted thick sensors are seriously affected and the measurement of galaxy shapes for cosmic shear measurements requires an accurate correction of the effect in…
Weak gravitational lensing causes subtle changes in the apparent shapes of galaxies due to the bending of light by the gravity of foreground masses. By measuring the shapes of large numbers of galaxies (millions in recent surveys, up to…
Removing systematic effects from astronomical images taken with CCDs requires a detailed understanding of the physics of the imaging process. To aid in this understanding, we have built detailed electrostatic simulations of the LSST CCDs.…
Weak lensing by large scale structure or 'cosmic shear' is a potentially powerful cosmological probe to shed new light on Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Modified Gravity. It is based on the weak distortions induced by large-scale structures…
The Brighter-Fatter (hereafter BF) effect in CCD sensors causes increases in the image size of bright objects due to electrostatic repulsion of collected charges. Correcting this effect in the LSST camera is required in order to meet the…
This paper summarizes the introductory presentation for a workshop that explored the challenges of making precision astronomical measurements using deeply depleted (thick) CCDs. While thick CCDs provide definite advantages in terms of…
Flat-field images with thick, fully-depleted CCDs exhibit response variations near the edges of the chip and at other locations, such as the regoins bordering mid-frame blooming stop implants. Two possible origins for these repsonse…
We present evidence that spots imaged using astronomical CCDs do not exactly scale with flux: bright spots tend to be broader than faint ones, using the same illumination pattern. We measure that the linear size of spots or stars, of…
Weak gravitational lensing studies aim to measure small distortions in the shapes of distant galaxies, and thus place very tight demands on the understanding of detector-induced systematic effects in astronomical images. The Wide-Field…
CCD sensors do not deliver a perfect image of the light they receive. Beyond the well known linear image smearing due to diffusion of charges during their drift towards the pixel wells, non-linear effects are at play in these sensors. We…
(Abridged) Weak gravitational lensing induces distortions on the images of background galaxies, and thus provides a direct measure of mass fluctuations in the universe. Since the distortions induced by lensing on the images of background…
Charge-coupled devices (CCDs) are widely used in astronomy to carry out a variety of measurements, such as for flux or shape of astrophysical objects. The data reduction procedures almost always assume that ther esponse of a given pixel to…
Current optical space telescopes rely upon silicon Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) to detect and image the incoming photons. The performance of a CCD detector depends on its ability to transfer electrons through the silicon efficiently, so…
We have discovered an anomalous behavior of CCD readout electronics that affects their use in many astronomical applications. An offset in the digitization of the CCD output voltage that depends on the binary encoding of one pixel is added…
Photo-generated charge in thick, back-illuminated, fully-depleted CCDs is transported by electric fields from the silicon substrate to the collecting well at the front gate of the CCDs. However, electric fields transverse to the surface of…
We present a detailed method to simulating sensor distortions using a photon and electron Monte Carlo method. We use three dimensional electrostatic simulations to parameterize the perturbed electric field profile for non-ideal sensor…
Wavelength-dependent point spread functions (PSFs) violate an implicit assumption in current galaxy shape measurement algorithms that deconvolve the PSF measured from stars (which have stellar spectral energy distributions (SEDs)) from…
The 3.2 gigapixel LSST camera, an array of 189 thick fully-depleted CCDs, will repeatedly image the southern sky and accomplish a wide variety of science goals. However, its trove of tens of billions of object images implies stringent…
The VIS instrument on board the Euclid mission is a weak-lensing experiment that depends on very precise shape measurements of distant galaxies obtained by a large CCD array. Due to the harsh radiative environment outside the Earth's…