Star-Galaxy Classification in Multi-Band Optical Imaging

Understand

Ground-based optical surveys such as PanSTARRS, DES, and LSST, will produce large catalogs to limiting magnitudes of r > 24.

• Star-galaxy separation poses a major challenge to such surveys because galaxies---even very compact galaxies---outnumber halo stars at these depths.
• We investigate photometric classification techniques on stars and galaxies with intrinsic FWHM < 0.2 arcsec.
• We consider unsupervised spectral energy distribution template fitting and supervised, data-driven Support Vector Machines (SVM).