Ubercalibration of the Deep Lens Survey

TL;DR

This paper details the internal photometric calibration of the Deep Lens Survey using an approach adapted from SDSS, significantly reducing spatial nonuniformities and providing lessons for future wide-field survey calibration.

Contribution

It adapts the ubercalibration method for a survey with isolated fields and multiple observatories, improving flatfield corrections and calibration accuracy.

Findings

Sky flats were nonuniform by up to 0.13 mag in z band.

Application of corrections reduced nonuniformities to 0.01-0.02 mag.

The method is essential for accurate wide-field photometry.

Abstract

We describe the internal photometric calibration of the Deep Lens Survey, which consists of five widely separated fields observed by two different observatories. Adopting the global linear least-squares ("ubercal") approach developed for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), we derive flatfield corrections for all observing runs, which indicate that the original sky flats were nonuniform by up to 0.13 mag peak to valley in $\z$ band, and by up to half that amount in {\it BVR}. We show that application of these corrections reduces spatial nonuniformities in corrected exposures to the 0.01-0.02 mag level. We conclude with some lessons learned in applying ubercal to a survey structured very differently from SDSS, with isolated fields, multiple observatories, and shift-and-stare rather than drift-scan imaging. Although the size of the error caused by using sky or dome flats is instrument- and wavelength-dependent, users of wide-field cameras should not assume that it is small. Pipeline developers should facilitate routine application of this procedure, and surveys should include it in their plans from the outset.