Photometric Effects on Gravitational Lensing Data: Flux Calibrating of Abell 1689 from SuperBIT’s 2023 Flight

Abstract

During its 2023 flight, the Super-pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) collected deep, wide-field, diffraction-limited images focused around several targets with the goal of exploring weak gravitational lensing. This imaging data helps further understandings of cluster lensing caused by dark matter in galaxy clusters. This paper suggests galaxy selection criteria for identifying objects within SuperBIT’s field of the Abell 1689 galaxy cluster that are ideal for future cosmological weak lensing analysis. Modelled after the Subaru Telescope Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) software pipeline, a PSF analysis and galaxy deblending algorithm were developed to analyse the Abell 1689 catalog. Finally, an algorithm was developed to correlate the SuperBIT pixel counts to HSC CModel flux values in nano Jansky. Selection resulted in the identification 339 galaxies within SuperBIT field of view, and a subsection of that catalog identified the 50 brightest, that were ideal for flux calibration analysis. The rudimentary processing algorithm found a r = .75 correlation between the SuperBIT and HSC images. The objects were analyses in 5 HSC filter bands, and 3 SuperBIT bands, 2 of which overlapped with HSC filters.