It is important to quantify the underestimation of rms photometric errors returned by the commonly used $\emph APPHOT$ algorithm in the $\emph IRAF$ software, in the context of differential photometry of point-like AGN, because of the crucial role it plays in evaluating their variability properties. Published values of the underestimation factor, $η$, using several different telescopes, lie in the range 1.3 - 1.75. The present study aims to revisit this question by employing an exceptionally large data set of 262 differential light curves (DLCs) derived from 262 pairs of non-varying stars monitored under our ARIES AGN monitoring program for characterizing the intra-night optical variability (INOV) of prominent AGN classes. The bulk of these data were taken with the 1-m Sampurnanad Telescope (ST). We find $η$ = 1.54$\pm$0.05 which is close to our recently reported value of $η$ = 1.5. Moreover, this consistency holds at least up to a brightness mismatch of 1.5 mag between the paired stars. From this we infer that a magnitude difference of at least up to 1.5 mag between a point-like AGN and comparison star(s) monitored simultaneously is within the same CCD chip acceptable, as it should not lead to spurious claims of INOV.
We develop a general method to "self-calibrate" observations of galaxy clustering with respect to systematics associated with photometric calibration errors. We first point out the danger posed by the multiplicative effect of calibration errors, where large-angle error propagates to small scales and may be significant even if the large-scale information is cleaned or not used in the cosmological analysis. We then propose a method to measure the arbitrary large-scale calibration errors and use these measurements to correct the small-scale (high-multipole) power which is most useful for constrai…
The uncertainty in the photometric redshift estimation is one of the major systematics in weak lensing cosmology. The self-calibration method is able to reduce this systematics without assuming strong priors. We improve the recently proposed self-calibration algorithm to enhance the stability and robustness with the noisy measurement. The improved algorithm is tested on the power spectra measured from the simulated catalogues constructed according to DECaLS DR8 photometric catalogue. For the fiducial analysis with 5 equal-width redshift bins over $0<z<1$ and 6 bands over scales $100 \leq \ell<…
Accurate photometric redshift calibration is central to the robustness of all cosmology constraints from cosmic shear surveys. Analyses of the KiDS re-weighted training samples from all overlapping spectroscopic surveys to provide a direct redshift calibration. Using self-organising maps (SOMs) we demonstrate that this spectroscopic compilation is sufficiently complete for KiDS, representing $99\%$ of the effective 2D cosmic shear sample. We use the SOM to define a $100\%$ represented `gold' cosmic shear sample, per tomographic bin. Using mock simulations of KiDS and the spectroscopic training…
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 characterization of biases and uncertainties in photo-z's. Any significant miscalibration will lead to systematic errors in photo-z's, impacting nearly all extragalactic science with LSST. As existing deep redshift samples have failed to yield highly-secure redshifts for a systematic 20%-60% of their targets, it is a strong possibility that future deep spectrosc…
We present the photometric calibration of the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) fields. The SNLS aims at measuring the distances to SNe Ia at (0.3<z<1) using MegaCam, the 1 deg^2 imager on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). The uncertainty affecting the photometric calibration of the survey dominates the systematic uncertainty of the key measurement of the survey, namely the dark energy equation of state. The photometric calibration of the SNLS requires obtaining a uniform response across the imager, calibrating the science field stars in each survey band (SDSS-like ugriz bands) with resp…
The cosmological exploitation of modern photometric galaxy surveys requires both accurate (unbiased) and precise (narrow) redshift probability distributions derived from broadband photometry. Existing methodologies do not meet those requirements. Standard template fitting delivers interpretable models and errors, but lacks flexibility to learn inaccuracies in the observed photometry or the spectral templates. Machine learning addresses those issues, but requires representative training data, and the resulting models and uncertainties cannot be interpreted in the context of a physical model or …
Weak gravitational lensing is one of the most promising cosmological probes to constrain dark matter, dark energy, and the nature of gravity at cosmic scales. Intrinsic alignments (IAs) of galaxies have been recognized as one of the most serious systematic effects facing gravitational lensing. Such alignments must be isolated and removed to obtain a pure lensing signal. Furthermore, the alignments are related to the processes of galaxy formation, so their extracted signal can help in understanding such formation processes and improving their theoretical modeling. We report in this Letter the f…
We use N-body/photometric galaxy simulations to examine the impact of sample variance of spectroscopic redshift samples on the accuracy of photometric redshift (photo-z) determination and calibration of photo-z errors. We estimate the biases in the cosmological parameter constraints from weak lensing and derive requirements on the spectroscopic follow-up for three different photo-z algorithms chosen to broadly span the range of algorithms available. We find that sample variance is much more relevant for the photo-z error calibration than for photo-z training, implying that follow-up requiremen…
Galaxy cross-correlations with high-fidelity redshift samples hold the potential to precisely calibrate systematic photometric redshift uncertainties arising from the unavailability of complete and representative training and validation samples of galaxies. However, application of this technique in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) is hampered by the relatively low number density, small area, and modest redshift overlap between photometric and spectroscopic samples. We propose instead using photometric catalogs with reliable photometric redshifts for photo-z calibration via cross-correlations. We v…
Current and future Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation experiments are targeting the polarized $B$-mode signal. The small amplitude of this signal makes a successful measurement challenging for current technologies. Therefore, very accurate studies to mitigate and control possible systematic effects are vital to achieve a successful observation. An additional challenge is coming from the presence of polarized Galactic foreground signals that contaminate the CMB signal. When they are combined, the foreground signals dominate the polarized CMB signal at almost every relevant frequency. F…
Photo-z errors, especially catastrophic errors, are a major uncertainty for precision weak lensing cosmology. We find that the shear-(galaxy number) density and density-density cross correlation measurements between photo-z bins, available from the same lensing surveys, contain valuable information for self-calibration of the scattering probabilities between the true-z and photo-z bins. The self-calibration technique we propose does not rely on cosmological priors nor parameterization of the photo-z probability distribution function, and preserves all of the cosmological information available …
We present a combined photometric calibration of the SNLS and the SDSS supernova survey, which results from a joint effort of the SDSS and the SNLS collaborations. We deliver fluxes calibrated to the HST spectrophotometric star network for large sets of tertiary stars that cover the science fields of both surveys in all photometric bands. We also cross-calibrate directly the two surveys and demonstrate their consistency. For each survey the flat-fielding is revised based on the analysis of dithered star observations. The calibration transfer from the HST spectrophotometric standard stars to th…
We use N-body-spectro-photometric simulations to investigate the impact of incompleteness and incorrect redshifts in spectroscopic surveys to photometric redshift training and calibration and the resulting effects on cosmological parameter estimation from weak lensing shear-shear correlations. The photometry of the simulations is modeled after the upcoming Dark Energy Survey and the spectroscopy is based on a low/intermediate resolution spectrograph with wavelength coverage of 5500Å < λ < 9500Å. The principal systematic errors that such a spectroscopic follow-up encounters are incompleteness (…
We present an iterative scheme designed to recover calibrated I, Q, and U maps from Planck-HFI data using the orbital dipole due to the satellite motion with respect to the Solar System frame. It combines a map reconstruction, based on a destriping technique, juxtaposed with an absolute calibration algorithm. We evaluate systematic and statistical uncertainties incurred during both these steps with the help of realistic, Planck-like simulations containing CMB, foreground components and instrumental noise, and assess the accuracy of the sky map reconstruction by considering the maps of the resi…
Calibrating the photometric redshifts of >10^9 galaxies for upcoming weak lensing cosmology experiments is a major challenge for the astrophysics community. The path to obtaining the required spectroscopic redshifts for training and calibration is daunting, given the anticipated depths of the surveys and the difficulty in obtaining secure redshifts for some faint galaxy populations. Here we present an analysis of the problem based on the self-organizing map, a method of mapping the distribution of data in a high-dimensional space and projecting it onto a lower-dimensional representation. We ap…
We present a method that accurately propagates residual uncertainties in photometric redshift distributions into the cosmological inference from weak lensing measurements. The redshift distributions of tomographic redshift bins are parameterised using a flexible modified Gaussian mixture model. We fit this model to pre-calibrated redshift distributions and implement an analytic marginalisation over the potentially several hundred redshift nuisance parameters in the weak lensing likelihood, which is demonstrated to accurately recover the cosmological posterior. By iteratively fitting cosmologic…
Weak gravitational lensing is a valuable probe of galaxy formation and cosmology. Here we quantify the effects of using photometric redshifts (photo-z) in galaxy-galaxy lensing, for both sources and lenses, both for the immediate goal of using galaxies with photo-z as lenses in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and as a demonstration of methodology for large, upcoming weak lensing surveys that will by necessity be dominated by lens samples with photo-z. We calculate the bias in the lensing mass calibration as well as consequences for absolute magnitude (i.e., k-corrections) and stellar mass …
Photo-z error is one of the major sources of systematics degrading the accuracy of weak lensing cosmological inferences. Zhang et al. (2010) proposed a self-calibration method combining galaxy-galaxy correlations and galaxy-shear correlations between different photo-z bins. Fisher matrix analysis shows that it can determine the rate of photo-z outliers at a level of 0.01-1% merely using photometric data and do not rely on any prior knowledge. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm to implement this method by solving a constrained nonlinear optimization problem arising in the self-calibratio…
We present photometric recalibration of the Subaru Deep Field (SDF) and Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Survey (SXDS). Recently, Yamanoi et al. (2012) suggested the existence of a discrepancy between the SDF and SXDS catalogs. We have used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 8 (DR8) catalog and compared stars in common between SDF/SXDS and SDSS. We confirmed that there exists a 0.12 mag offset in B-band between the SDF and SXDS catalogs. Moreover, we found that significant zero point offsets in i-band (~ 0.10 mag) and z-band (~ 0.14 mag) need to be introduced to the SDF/SXDS catalogs to ma…
Large sets of objects with spectroscopic redshift measurements will be needed for imaging dark energy experiments to achieve their full potential, serving two goals:_training_, i.e., the use of objects with known redshift to develop and optimize photometric redshift algorithms; and_calibration_, i.e., the characterization of moments of redshift (or photo-z error) distributions. Better training makes cosmological constraints from a given experiment stronger, while highly-accurate calibration is needed for photo-z systematics not to dominate errors. In this white paper, we investigate the requir…
Imperfect photometric calibration of galaxy surveys due to either astrophysical or instrumental effects leads to biases in measuring galaxy clustering and in the resulting cosmological parameter measurements. More interestingly (and disturbingly), the spatially varying calibration also generically leads to violations of statistical isotropy of the galaxy clustering signal. Here we develop, for the first time, a formalism to propagate the effects of photometric calibration variations with arbitrary spatial dependence across the sky to the observed power spectra and to the cosmological parameter…
We consider the application of relative self-calibration using overlap regions to spectroscopic galaxy surveys that use slit-less spectroscopy. This method is based on that developed for the SDSS by Padmanabhan at al. (2008) in that we consider jointly fitting and marginalising over calibrator brightness, rather than treating these as free parameters. However, we separate the calibration of the detector-to-detector from the full-focal-plane exposure-to-exposure calibration. To demonstrate how the calibration procedure will work, we simulate the procedure for a potential implementation of the s…
Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) measurements of the Hubble constant, H$_0$, the cosmological mass density, $Ω_M$, and the dark energy equation-of-state parameter, $w$, rely on numerous SNe surveys using distinct photometric systems across three decades of observation. Here, we determine the sensitivities of the upcoming SH0ES+Pantheon+ constraints on H$_0$, $Ω_M$, and $w$ to unknown systematics in the relative photometric zeropoint calibration between the 17 surveys that comprise the Pantheon+ supernovae data set. Varying the zeropoints of these surveys simultaneously with the cosmological paramet…
We present a calibration of the Tip of the Red Giant Branch (TRGB) in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) on the HST/ACS F814W system. We use archival HST observations to derive blending corrections and photometric transformations for two ground-based wide-area imaging surveys of the Magellanic Clouds. We show that these surveys are biased bright by up to ~0.1 mag in the optical due to blending, and that the bias is a function of local stellar density. We correct the LMC TRGB magnitudes from Jang & Lee (2017) and use the geometric distance from Pietrzynski et al. (2019) to obtain an absolute TRGB…
We present a cosmic shear analysis with an improved redshift calibration for the fourth data release of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS-1000) using self-organising maps (SOMs). Compared to the previous analysis of the KiDS-1000 data, we expand the redshift calibration sample to more than twice its size, now consisting of data of 17 spectroscopic redshift campaigns, and significantly extending the fraction of KiDS galaxies we are able to calibrate with our SOM redshift methodology. We then enhance the calibration sample with precision photometric redshifts from COSMOS2015 and the Physics of the Ac…
We present improved methods for using stars found in astronomical exposures to calibrate both star and galaxy colors as well as to adjust the instrument flat field. By developing a spectroscopic model for the SDSS stellar locus in color-color space, synthesizing an expected stellar locus, and simultaneously solving for all unknown zeropoints when fitting to the instrumental locus, we increase the calibration accuracy of stellar locus matching. We also use a new combined technique to estimate improved flat-field models for the Subaru SuprimeCam camera, forming `star flats' based on the magnitud…
We compare the absolute gain photometric calibration of the Planck/HFI and Herschel/SPIRE instruments on diffuse emission. The absolute calibration of HFI and SPIRE each relies on planet flux measurements and comparison with theoretical far-infrared emission models of planetary atmospheres. We measure the photometric cross calibration between the instruments at two overlapping bands, 545 GHz / 500 $μ$m and 857 GHz / 350 $μ$m. The SPIRE maps used have been processed in the Herschel Interactive Processing Environment (Version 12) and the HFI data are from the 2015 Public Data Release 2. For our …
BayeSN $\times$ Dovekie: Joint Photometric Cross-calibration and SED Modelling of Type Ia Supernovae
Institute of Astronomy and Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学天体物理研究所与卡弗里宇宙学研究所）；School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton（南安普顿大学物理与天文学院）
Calibrating the redshift distributions of photometric galaxy samples is essential in weak lensing studies. The self-calibration method combines angular auto- and cross-correlations between galaxies in multiple photometric redshift (photo-$z$) bins to reconstruct the scattering rates matrix between redshift bins. In this paper, we test a recently proposed self-calibration algorithm using the DECaLS Data Release 9 and investigate to what extent the scattering rates are determined. We first mitigate the spurious angular correlations due to imaging systematics by a machine learning based method. W…
We present updated cosmological constraints for the KiDS+VIKING-450 cosmic shear data set (KV450), estimated using redshift distributions and photometric samples defined using self-organising maps (SOMs). Our fiducial analysis finds marginal posterior constraints of $S_8\equivσ_8\sqrt{Ω_{\rm m}/0.3}=0.716^{+0.043}_{-0.038}$; smaller than, but otherwise consistent with, previous work using this data set ($|ΔS_8| = 0.023$). We analyse additional samples and redshift distributions constructed in three ways: excluding certain spectroscopic surveys during redshift calibration, excluding lower-confi…
