Related papers: Assessment of Systematic Chromatic Errors that Imp…
Calibration uncertainties have been the leading systematic uncertainty in recent analyses using type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) to measure cosmological parameters. To improve the calibration, we present the application of Spectral Energy…
Many scientific goals for the Dark Energy Survey (DES) require calibration of optical/NIR broadband $b = grizY$ photometry that is stable in time and uniform over the celestial sky to one percent or better. It is also necessary to limit to…
One source of error in high-precision radial velocity measurements of exoplanet host stars is chromatic change in Earth's atmospheric transmission during observations. Mitigation of this error requires that the photon-weighted barycentric…
We characterize the ability of the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to perform relative astrometry across its 500~Mpix, 3 deg^2 science field of view, and across 4 years of operation. This is done using internal comparisons of ~4x10^7…
We characterize the variation in photometric response of the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) across its 520~Mpix science array during 4 years of operation. These variations are measured using high signal-to-noise aperture photometry of $>10^7$…
We describe the model for the mapping from sky brightness to the digital output of the Dark Energy Camera, and the algorithms adopted by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) for inverting this model to obtain photometric measures of celestial…
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a 5000 sq deg griz imaging survey to be conducted using a proposed 3 sq deg (2.2deg-diameter) wide-field mosaic camera on the CTIO Blanco 4m telescope. The primary scientific goal of the DES is to constrain…
The wavelength dependence of atmospheric refraction causes elongation of finite-bandwidth images along the elevation vector, which produces spurious signals in weak gravitational lensing shear measurements unless this atmospheric dispersion…
We study the impact of systematic errors on planned weak lensing surveys and compute the requirements on their contributions so that they are not a dominant source of the cosmological parameter error budget. The generic types of error we…
Wavelength-dependent atmospheric effects impact photometric supernova flux measurements for ground-based observations. We present corrections on supernova flux measurements from the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program's 5YR sample…
This white paper summarizes the conclusions of the Snowmass White Paper "Spectroscopic Needs for Imaging Dark Energy Experiments" (arXiv:1309.5384) which are relevant to the calibration of LSST photometric redshifts; i.e., the accurate…
As one of the best ground-based photometric dataset, Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) has been widely used as the reference to calibrate other surveys. In this work, we present an independent validation and re-calibration of the PS1 photometry using…
The science goals for ground-based large-area surveys, such as the Dark Energy Survey, Pan-STARRS, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, require calibration of broadband photometry that is stable in time and uniform over the sky to…
Observations of density variations in stellar streams are a promising probe of low-mass dark matter substructure in the Milky Way. However, survey systematics such as variations in seeing and sky brightness can also induce artificial…
In this work, we perform the re-calibration of PS1 photometry by correcting for position-dependent systematic errors using the spectroscopy-based Stellar Color Regression method (SCR), the photometry-based SCR method (SCR$'$), and the Gaia…
We review the systematic uncertainties that have plagued attempts to obtain high precision and high accuracy from ground-based photometric measurements using CCDs. We identify two main challenges in breaking through the 1% precision…
Over the past 2 decades, wide-field photometric surveys in optical and infrared domains reached a nearly all-sky coverage thanks to numerous observational facilities operating in both hemispheres. However, subtle differences among exact…
Current and future imaging surveys will measure cosmic shear with statistical precision that demands a deeper understanding of potential systematic biases in galaxy shape measurements than has been achieved to date. We use analytic and…
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 study the impact of the atmospheric differential chromatic refraction on the measurements and precision of relative astrometry. Specifically, we address the problem of measuring the separations of close pairs of binary stars with…