# The bright-star masks for the HSC-SSP survey

## TL;DR

This paper details the development and validation of bright-star masks for the HSC-SSP survey, utilizing Gaia and Tycho-2 star catalogs, with automated mask creation and thorough validation procedures.

## Contribution

It introduces a new automated method for creating and validating bright-star masks for the HSC-SSP survey, improving upon previous versions and providing publicly available tools and masks.

## Key findings

- Star catalog purity is 99.2% down to G_Gaia < 18.
- Masks effectively identify saturated stars in the survey footprint.
- Validation confirms masks' accuracy through visual and statistical comparisons.

## Abstract

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 $G_{\rm Gaia} < 18$ after removing $\sim1.5\%$ 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 $99.2\%$ pure down to $G_{\rm Gaia} < 18$. Second, we build the mask regions in an automated way using stacked detected source measurements around bright stars binned per $G_{\rm Gaia}$ magnitude. Finally, we validate those masks from visual inspection and comparison with the literature of galaxy number counts and angular two-point correlation functions. This version (Arcturus) supersedes the previous version (Sirius) used in the S16A internal and DR1 public releases. We publicly release the full masks and tools to flag objects in the entire footprint of the planned HSC-SSP observations at this address: ftp://obsftp.unige.ch/pub/coupon/brightStarMasks/HSC-SSP/.