Project leads: Kanak Saha (IUCAA)
Point of contact: Kanak Saha (kanak@iucaa.in)
Rubin project code: IND-IUC-7
Relevant working groups: Low-surface-brightness science
Project status: Active
Deep Field observations play a key role in detecting faint sources in the sky, essential to quantify the faint-end galaxy luminosity function . Since typical deep fields are confined to small patches of the sky, traditional softwares such as SourceExtractor (Bertin et al.), guided by visual inspection works well to spot faint objects. However, the task of fain object detection can be challenging as deeep field sky coverage increases, as will be with LSST. Traditional source detection algorithms, as in SourceExtractor, are often based on user defined threshold. As a result, faint sources that do not qualify the threshold based criteria will remain undetected in astronomical images. The aim of our project is to come up with an algorithm to overcome this.