Quick search Find article
Quick search
Find article

PSF anisotropy and systematic errors in weak lensing surveys

Bhuvnesh Jain, Mike Jarvis and Gary Bernstein

Show affiliations


Given the basic parameters of a cosmic shear weak lensing survey, how well can systematic errors due to anisotropy in the point spread function (PSF) be corrected? The largest source of error in this correction to date has been the interpolation of the PSF to the locations of the galaxies. To address this error, we separate the PSF patterns into components that recur in multiple exposures/pointings and those that vary randomly between different exposures (such as those due to the atmosphere). In an earlier study we developed a principal component approach to correct the recurring PSF patterns. In this paper we show how randomly varying PSF patterns can also be circumvented in the measurement of shear correlations. For the two-point correlation function this is done by simply using pairs of galaxy shapes measured in different exposures. Combining the two techniques allows us to tackle generic combinations of PSF anisotropy patterns. The second goal of this paper is to give a formalism for quantifying residual systematic errors due to PSF patterns. We show how the main PSF corrections improve with increasing survey area (and thus can stay below the reduced statistical errors), and we identify the residual errors which do not scale with survey area. Our formalism can be applied both to planned lensing surveys to optimize survey strategy and to actual lensing data to quantify residual errors.


Keywords

gravitational lensing

dark matter

lensing

 

E-print Number: astro-ph/0510231

Cited: by |

Refers: to

PACS

98.35.-a Characteristics and properties of the Milky Way galaxy

98.80.Es Observational cosmology (including Hubble constant, distance scale, cosmological constant, early Universe, etc)

06.20.Dk Measurement and error theory

Subjects

Instrumentation and measurement

Gravitation and cosmology

Astrophysics and astroparticles

Dates

Issue 02 (February 2006)

Received 15 October 2005, accepted for publication 13 January 2006

Published 2 February 2006



Users also read

What's this?
This innovative new feature generates a list of articles 'also read' by other users based on them reading the original article. Article abstracts citations and references are all considered and weighted accordingly. We hope that this will help you find relevant papers for your research.

  1. Shapes and Shears, Stars and Smears: Optimal Measurements for Weak Lensing
  2. The Ellipticity of the Disks of Spiral Galaxies
  3. Differential Galaxy Evolution in Cluster and Field Galaxies at z ≈ 0.3
More

View by subject




Export








Please login to access our web services, or create an account if you don't yet have one.

You must have cookies enabled in your web browser to be able to login.

Username
Password

Forgotten your password? Get a new one here.