Ph.D. Candidate:  Claire-Alice Hebert
Research Advisor:  Pat Burchat

Zoom info: https://stanford.zoom.us/j/97152560077?pwd=d0FndWJHN3FBY2k1WlNWZ04wOEM5…

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will image tens of billions of galaxies over ten years—a 100x increase from previous surveys—enabling the most precise measurements of dark energy properties to date. Realizing the full potential of this powerful dataset requires an unprecedented understanding of observational effects that, if uncorrected, can bias the science results. My research has focused on the degradation of images by atmospheric turbulence, which imprints spatially correlated noise on scales (and with amplitudes) similar to the cosmological signal we will study: the spatial correlation of positions and shapes of galaxies on the plane of the sky due to gravitational lensing of light by the dark matter in the Universe. In this presentation, I will describe a new tool I have developed, that allows us to study and model the dependence of these atmospheric noise correlations on weather conditions at any observatory and will show results for Rubin Observatory in particular.