Testing Shear Recovery with Field Distortion

The tilt, rotation, or offset of each CCD with respect to the focal plane, as well as the distortion of the focal plane itself, causes shape distortions in the observed objects, an effect typically known as field distortion (FD). We point out that FD provides a unique way of quantifying the accuracy of cosmic shear measurement. The idea is to stack the shear estimators from galaxies that share similar FD-induced shape distortions. Given that the latter can be calculated with parameters from astrometric calibrations, the accuracy of the shear estimator can be directly tested on real images. It provides a way to calibrate the multiplicative and additive shear recovery biases within the scientific data itself, without requiring simulations or any external data sets. We use the CFHTLenS images to test the Fourier_Quad shear recovery method. We highlight some details in our image-processing pipeline, including background removal, source identification and deblending, astrometric calibration, star selection for point-spread function reconstruction, noise reduction, etc. We show that in the shear ranges of -0.005 ≲ g ₁ ≲ 0.005 and -0.008 ≲ g ₂ ≲ 0.008, the multiplicative biases are at the level of ≲0.04. Slight additive biases on the order of ∼5 × 10^-4 (6σ) are identified for sources provided by the official CFHTLenS catalog (not using its shear catalog), but are minor (4σ) for the source catalog generated by our Fourier_Quad pipeline.