Deep Large Binocular Camera r-band Observations of the GOODS-N Field

Understand

We obtained 838 Sloan r-band images (~28 hrs) of the GOODS-North field with the Large Binocular Camera (LBC) on the Large Binocular Telescope in order to study the presence of extended, low surface brightness features in galaxies and investigate the trade-off between image depth and resolution.

• The individual images were sorted by effective seeing, which allowed for optimal resolution and optimal depth mosaics to be created with all images with seeing FWHM < 0.9&#34; and FWHM < 2.0&#34;, respectively.
• Examining bright galaxies and their substructure as well as accurately deblending overlapping objects requires the optimal resolution mosaic, while detecting the faintest objects possible (to a limiting magnitude of $m_{AB}$ ~ 29.2 mag) requires the optimal depth mosaic.
• The better surface brightness sensitivity resulting from the larger LBC pixels, compared to those of extant WFC3/UVIS and ACS/WFC cameras aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) allows for unambiguous detection of both diffuse flux and very faint tidal tails.