Song Huang has posted the first paper in a series on the Extended Stellar Halos of Massive Galaxies. This paper takes advantage of stunning new data from the Hyper Suprime Cam Survey (which is both wide and deep) to map out the light profiles of several thousand massive galaxies to 100 kpc. Song finds a large diversity in the outskirts of massive galaxies. But this scatter in not completely random … in a forthcoming paper, Song will show that this scatter correlates with the dark matter halo mass that hosts these giant galaxies. Stay tuned!

Many fantastic talks and the KITP conference Quantifying and Understanding the Galaxy-Halo Connection. You can see all of the talks  on the KITP website.

Our team just published the details of of first year shear catalog paper! You can now find our paper on the archive (Mandelbaum et al. 2017).

Expect a suite of HSC lensing papers soon!

Together with the HSC team, we have been working to develop the HSC Synthetic Galaxy Pipeline (SynPipe). This is a versatile tool that injects synthetic galaxies into real HSC images and can be used to test for a range of systematic effects (photometry, blending, star galaxy separation). Song Huang just published the first SynPipe paper which can now be found on the archive (Huang et al. 2017)!

Hyper Suprime Cam Survey First Data Release!

The HSC collaboration has now completed the two years of an ambitious 300-night imaging survey using the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the Subaru 8.2m telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i.  HSC has a 1.8 deg^2 field-of-view (FOV), which is unique for an 8m-class telescope. The combination of the wide FOV and large mirror diameter gives us unprecedented survey power, allowing us to perform three nested
surveys.  The Wide survey layer will image ~ 1400 deg^2 in grizy to a depth of i~26 mag (5 sigma, point source). The 28 deg^2 Deep layer will go a magnitude deeper, providing a time-domain survey component.  Finally, the Ultra-deep layer will cover two HSC pointings (3.5 deg^2) to a depth of i ~ 28
mag, in addition to a narrow-band component to detect Ly alpha emitters out to z~7.

We just release our first set of data! This corresponds to about 100 square degrees of 5 band imaging to an i band magnitude of 26. Details can be found here.