1 research outputs found
Improving the LSST dithering pattern and cadence for dark energy studies
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will explore the entire southern
sky over 10 years starting in 2022 with unprecedented depth and time sampling
in six filters, . Artificial power on the scale of the 3.5 deg LSST
field-of-view will contaminate measurements of baryonic acoustic oscillations
(BAO), which fall at the same angular scale at redshift . Using the
HEALPix framework, we demonstrate the impact of an "un-dithered" survey, in
which of each LSST field-of-view is overlapped by neighboring
observations, generating a honeycomb pattern of strongly varying survey depth
and significant artificial power on BAO angular scales. We find that adopting
large dithers (i.e., telescope pointing offsets) of amplitude close to the LSST
field-of-view radius reduces artificial structure in the galaxy distribution by
a factor of 10. We propose an observing strategy utilizing large dithers
within the main survey and minimal dithers for the LSST Deep Drilling Fields.
We show that applying various magnitude cutoffs can further increase survey
uniformity. We find that a magnitude cut of removes significant
spurious power from the angular power spectrum with a minimal reduction in the
total number of observed galaxies over the ten-year LSST run. We also determine
the effectiveness of the observing strategy for Type Ia SNe and predict that
the main survey will contribute 100,000 Type Ia SNe. We propose a
concentrated survey where LSST observes one-third of its main survey area each
year, increasing the number of main survey Type Ia SNe by a factor of
1.5, while still enabling the successful pursuit of other science
drivers.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, published in SPIE proceedings; corrected typo in
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