Engineering topics

Meyers, Joshua E.

Publications and source records attributed to Meyers, Joshua E..

4 records

DOE OSTI2026

In Situ Measurements of the Reflectances of the LSSTCam Optics and Assessing the Impact of Optical Ghosts

Optical ghosts are image artifacts caused by successive reflections of light between optical surfaces such as lenses, filters, and detectors. These artifacts are unavoidable due to the nonzero reflectances of optical elements and are a major source of contamination for low-surface-brightness science. We use optical ray tracing simulations tuned to observations from LSST Commissioning to quantify the impact of optical ghosts on the LSST data. In particular, we find that ~0.57% of the LSSTCam focal plane is impacted by optical ghosts when averaged across all bands. We also use data from the Collimated Beam Projector to measure the reflectances of various optical elements, generally confirming estimates of ~2% from the systems engineering throughput predictions.

Pai, Aashay↗

DOE OSTI2024

Generation of realistic input parameters for simulating atmospheric point-spread functions at astronomical observatories

High-fidelity simulated astronomical images are an important tool in developing and measuring the performance of image-processing algorithms, particularly for high precision measurements of cosmic shear – correlated distortions of images of distant galaxies due to weak gravitational lensing caused by the large-scale mass distribution in the Universe. For unbiased measurements of cosmic shear, all other sources of correlated image distortions must be modeled or removed. One such source is the correlated blurring of images due to optical turbulence in the atmosphere, which dominates the point-spread function (PSF) for ground-based instruments. In this work, we leverage data from weather forecasting models to produce wind speeds and directions, and turbulence parameters, that are realistically correlated with altitude. To study the resulting correlations in the size and shape of the PSF, we generate simulated images of the PSF across a ~10 square-degree field of view – the size of the camera focal plane for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile – using weather data and historical seeing for a geographic location near the Observatory. We make quantitative predictions for two-point correlation functions (2PCF) that are used in analyses of cosmic shear. We observe a strong anisotropy in the two-dimensional 2PCF, which is expected based on observations in real images, and study the dependence of the orientation of the anisotropy on dominant wind directions near the ground and at higher altitudes.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2022

Impact of point spread function higher moments error on weak gravitational lensing – II. A comprehensive study

ABSTRACT Weak lensing is one of the most powerful probes for dark matter and dark energy science, although it faces increasing challenges in controlling systematic uncertainties as the statistical errors become smaller. The point spread function (PSF) needs to be precisely modeled to avoid systematic error on the weak lensing measurements. The weak lensing biases induced by errors in the PSF model second moments, i.e. its size and shape, are well-studied. However, Zhang et al. showed that errors in the higher moments of the PSF may also be a significant source of systematics for upcoming weak lensing surveys. Therefore, this work comprehensively investigate the modelling quality of PSF moments from the 3rd to 6th order, and propagate the PSFEx higher moments modelling error in the HSC survey data set to the weak lensing shear–shear correlation functions and their cosmological analyses. The overall multiplicative shear bias associated with errors in PSF higher moments can cause an ∼0.1σ shift on the cosmological parameters for LSST Y10, while the associated additive biases can induce 1σ uncertainties in cosmology parameter inference for LSST Y10, if not accounted. We compare the PSFEx model with PSF in Full FOV, and find similar performance in modelling the PSF higher moments. We conclude that PSF higher moment errors of the future PSF models should be reduced from those in current methods, otherwise needed to be explicitly modeled in the weak lensing analysis.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2021

DESC DC2 Data Release Note

In preparation for cosmological analyses of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (LSST DESC) has created a 300 deg$^2$ simulated survey as part of an effort called Data Challenge 2 (DC2). The DC2 simulated sky survey, in six optical bands with observations following a reference LSST observing cadence, was processed with the LSST Science Pipelines (19.0.0). In this Note, we describe the public data release of the resulting object catalogs for the coadded images of five years of simulated observations along with associated truth catalogs. We include a brief description of the major features of the available data sets. To enable convenient access to the data products, we have developed a web portal connected to Globus data services. We describe how to access the data and provide example Jupyter Notebooks in Python to aid first interactions with the data. We welcome feedback and questions about the data release via a GitHub repository.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗