James Bosch

THE THIRD GRAVITATIONAL LENSING ACCURACY TESTING (GREAT3) CHALLENGE HANDBOOK

The GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing 3 (GREAT3) challenge is the third in a series of image analysis challenges, with a goal of testing and facilitating the development of methods for analyzing astronomical images that will be used to measure weak gravitational lensing. This measurement requires extremely precise estimation of very small galaxy shape distortions, in the presence of far larger intrinsic galaxy shapes and distortions due to the blurring kernel caused by the atmosphere, telescope optics, and instrumental effects. The GREAT3 challenge is posed to the astronomy, machine learning, and statistics communities, and includes tests of three specific effects that are of immediate relevance to upcoming weak lensing surveys, two of which have never been tested in a community challenge before. These effects include many novel aspects including realistically complex galaxy models based on high-resolution imaging from space; a spatially varying, physically motivated blurring kernel; and a combination of multiple different exposures. To facilitate entry by people new to the field, and for use as a diagnostic tool, the simulation software for the challenge is publicly available, though the exact parameters used for the challenge are blinded. Sample scripts to analyze the challenge data using existing methods will also be provided. See http://great3challenge.info and http://great3.projects.phys.ucl.ac.uk/leaderboard/ for more information.

The Hyper Suprime-Cam software pipeline

In this paper, we describe the optical imaging data processing pipeline developed for the Subaru Telescopes Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) instrument. The HSC Pipeline builds on the prototype pipeline being developed by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescopes Data Management system, adding customizations for HSC, large-scale processing capabilities, and novel algorithms that have since been reincorporated into the LSST codebase. While designed primarily to reduce HSC Subaru Strategic Program (SSP) data, it is also the recommended pipeline for reducing general-observer HSC data. The HSC pipeline includes high level processing steps that generate coadded images and science-ready catalogs as well as low-level detrending and image characterizations.

Subaru high-z exploration of low-luminosity quasars (SHELLQs). I. Discovery of 15 quasars and bright galaxies at 5.7 < z < 6.9

We report the discovery of 15 quasars and bright galaxies at 5.7 6 galaxies, compared with that of quasars, at magnitudes fainter than M1450 ~ -22 mag or zAB ~24 mag. Follow-up studies of the discovered objects as well as further survey observations are ongoing.

Subaru High-z Exploration of Low-Luminosity Quasars (SHELLQs). II. Discovery of 32 Quasars and Luminous Galaxies at 5.7 < z < 6.8

We present spectroscopic identification of 32 new quasars and luminous galaxies discovered at 5.7<z≤6.8. This is the second in a series of papers presenting the results of the Subaru High-z Exploration of Low-Luminosity Quasars (SHELLQs) project, which exploits the deep multi-band imaging data produced by the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Subaru Strategic Program survey. The photometric candidates were selected by a Bayesian probabilistic algorithm, and then observed with spectrographs on the Gran Telescopio Canarias and the Subaru Telescope. Combined with the sample presented in the previous paper, we have now identified 64 HSC sources over about 430 deg, which include 33 high-z quasars, 14 high-z luminous galaxies, 2 [O III] emitters at z ∼ 0.8, and 15 Galactic brown dwarfs. The new quasars have considerably lower luminosity (M1450 ∼−25 to −22 mag) than most of the previously known high-z quasars. Several of these quasars have luminous (> 10 erg s) and narrow (< 500 km s) Lyα lines, and also a possible mini broad absorption line system of N V λ1240 in the composite spectrum, which clearly separate them from typical quasars. On the other hand, the high-z galaxies have extremely high luminosity (M1450 ∼ −24 to −22 mag) compared to other galaxies found at similar redshift. With the discovery of these new classes of objects, we are opening up new parameter spaces in the high-z Universe. Further survey observations and follow-up studies of the identified objects, including the construction of the quasar luminosity function at z ∼ 6, are ongoing.

Characterization and photometric performance of the Hyper Suprime-Cam Software Pipeline

The Subaru Strategic Program (SSP) is an ambitious multi-band survey using the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the Subaru telescope. The Wide layer of the SSP is both wide and deep, reaching a detection limit of i~26.0 mag. At these depths, it is challenging to achieve accurate, unbiased, and consistent photometry across all five bands. The HSC data are reduced using a pipeline that builds on the prototype pipeline for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. We have developed a Python-based, flexible framework to inject synthetic galaxies into real HSC images called SynPipe. Here we explain the design and implementation of SynPipe and generate a sample of synthetic galaxies to examine the photometric performance of the HSC pipeline. For stars, we achieve 1% photometric precision at i~19.0 mag and 6% precision at i~25.0 in the i-band. For synthetic galaxies with single-Sersic profiles, forced CModel photometry achieves 13% photometric precision at i~20.0 mag and 18% precision at i~25.0 in the i-band. We show that both forced PSF and CModel photometry yield unbiased color estimates that are robust to seeing conditions. We identify several caveats that apply to the version of HSC pipeline used for the first public HSC data release (DR1) that need to be taking into consideration. First, the degree to which an object is blended with other objects impacts the overall photometric performance. This is especially true for point sources. Highly blended objects tend to have larger photometric uncertainties, systematically underestimated fluxes and slightly biased colors. Second, >20% of stars at 22.5 21.5 mag.

The bright-star masks for the HSC-SSP survey

We present the procedure to build and validate the bright-star masks for the Hyper-Suprime-Cam Strategic Subaru Proposal (HSC-SSP) survey. To identify and mask the saturated stars in the full HSC-SSP footprint, we rely on the Gaia and Tycho-2 star catalogues. We first assemble a pure star catalogue down to

The first-year shear catalog of the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program Survey

G_{\rm Gaia} < 18

Hyper-luminous dust-obscured galaxies discovered by the Hyper Suprime-Cam on Subaru and WISE

after removing

The quasar luminosity function at redshift 4 with the Hyper Suprime-Cam Wide Survey

\sim1.5\%

Investigating interoperability of the LSST data management software stack with Astropy

of sources that appear extended in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We perform visual inspection on the early data from the S16A internal release of HSC-SSP, finding that our star catalogue is