Coaddition Artifact Rejection and CompareWarp

Abstract

LSST images will be contaminated with transient artifacts, such as optical ghosts, satellite trails, and cosmic rays, and with transient astronomical sources, such as asteroid ephemerides. We developed and tested an algorithm to find and reject these artifacts during coaddition, in order to produce clean coadds to be used for deep detection and preliminary object characterization. This algorithm, CompareWarpAssembleCoadd, uses the time-series of PSF-matched warped images to identify transient artifacts. It detects artifact candidates on the image differences between each PSF-matched warp and a static sky model. These artifact candidates include both true transient artifacts and difference-image false positives such as difficult-subtract-sources and variable sources such as stars and quasars. We use the feature that true transients appear at a given position in the difference images in only a small fraction (configurable) of visits, whereas variable sources and difficult-to-subtract sources appear in most difference images. In this report, we present a description of the method and an evaluation using Hyper SuprimeCam PDR1 data.