Related papers: Is Flat Fielding Safe for Precision CCD Astronomy?

Large mosaic multiCCD camera is the key instrument for modern digital sky survey. DECam is an extremely red sensitive 520 Megapixel camera designed for the incoming Dark Energy Survey (DES). It is consist of sixty two 4k$\times$2k and…

Precision measurements in astronomy require stringent control of systematics such as those arising from imperfect correction of sensor effects. In this work, we develop a parametric method to model the wavelength dependence of pixel…

The ambitious science goals of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) have motivated a search for new and unexpected sources of systematic error in the LSST camera. Flat-field images are a rich source of data on sensor anomalies,…

One of the basic parameters of a CCD camera is its gain, i.e. the number of detected electrons per output Analogue to Digital Unit (ADU). This is normally determined by finding the statistical variances from a series of flat-field exposures…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Meeting the science goals for many current and future ground-based optical large-area sky surveys requires that the calibrated broadband photometry is stable in time and uniform over the sky to 1% precision or better. Past surveys have…

We describe the flattening of scientific CCD imaging data using a dome flat field system. The system uses light emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate a carefully constructed dome flat field screen. LEDs have several advantages over more…

Thick, fully depleted charge-coupled devices (CCDs) are known to exhibit non-linear behavior at high signal levels due to the dynamic behavior of charges collecting in the potential wells of pixels, called the brighter-fatter effect (BFE).…

One of the most common methods for inferring galaxy attenuation curves is via spectral energy distribution (SED) modeling, where the dust attenuation properties are modeled simultaneously with other galaxy physical properties. In this…

Interaction of charges in CCDs with the already accumulated charge distribution causes both a flux dependence of the point-spread function (an increase of observed size with flux, also known as the brighter/fatter effect) and pixel-to-pixel…

Flat-field reflects the non-uniformity of the photometric response at the focal plane of an instrument, which uses digital image sensors, such as Charge Coupled Device (CCD) and Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS). This…

Galaxy imaging surveys observe a vast number of objects that are affected by the instrument's Point Spread Function (PSF). Weak lensing missions, in particular, aim at measuring the shape of galaxies, and PSF effects represent an important…

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…

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…

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…

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's LSST Camera (LSSTCam) pixel response has been characterized using laboratory measurements with a grid of artificial stars. We quantify the contributions to photometry, centroid, point-spread function size,…

The weak-lensing science of the LSST project drives the need to carefully model and separate the instrumental artifacts from the intrinsic lensing signal. The dominant source of the systematics for all ground based telescopes is the spatial…