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

Upcoming and current large astronomical survey experiments often seek to constrain cosmological parameters via measurements of subtle effects such as weak lensing, which can only be measured statistically. In these cases, instrumental…

Background. Astrometry at or below the micro-arcsec level with an imaging telescope assumes that the uncertainty on the location of an unresolved source can be an arbitrarily small fraction of the detector pixel, given a sufficient photon…

In direct imaging, broad band flat-fields can easily be applied to correct deviation from uniform sensitivity across the detector field. However for slitless spectroscopy data the flat field is both field and wavelength dependent. The…

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…

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…

We describe a camera beam simulator for the LSST which is capable of illuminating a 60mm field at f/1.2 with realistic astronomical scenes, enabling studies of CCD astrometric and photometric performance. The goal is to fully simulate LSST…

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 describe a system to measure the Quantum Efficiency in the wavelength range of 300 nm to 1100 nm of 40x40 mm n-channel CCD sensors for the construction of the 3.2 gigapixel LSST focal plane. The technique uses a series of instrument to…

One of the main science goals of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is to uncover the nature of cosmic acceleration. In the base analysis, possible deviations from the Lambda-Cold-Dark-Matter ($\Lambda$CDM) background evolution will…

We use an empirical approach to characterize the effect of charge-transfer efficiency (CTE) losses in images taken with the Wide-Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys. The study is based on profiles of warm pixels in 168 dark…

We describe the commissioning of a system which has been built to investigate optimal operation of CCDs for the LSST telescope. The test system is designed for low vibration, high stability operation and is capable of illuminating a…

We build on previous efforts to model CCD sensors, during illumination and collection of conversions. We use a finite summation of simple, electrostatic field models. The upgraded functionality of our framework provides specific predictions…

Near-future astronomical survey experiments, such as LSST, possess system requirements of unprecedented fidelity that span photometry, astrometry and shape transfer. Some of these requirements flow directly to the array of science imaging…

We characterize the astrometric distortion at the edges of thick, fully-depleted CCDs in the lab using a bench-top simulation of LSST observing. By illuminating an array of forty thousand pinholes (30mu m diameter) at the object plane of a…

One of the possible approaches to detecting optical counterparts of GRBs requires monitoring large parts of the sky. This idea has gained some instrumental support in recent years, such as with the "Pi of the Sky" project. The broad sky…

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…

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…

We employ electrostatic conversion drift calculations to match CCD pixel signal covariances observed in flat field exposures acquired using candidate sensor devices for the LSST Camera. We thus constrain pixel geometry distortions present…

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…