* Astronomy

Title: CFHTLenS: The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey
Authors: Catherine Heymans, Ludovic Van Waerbeke, Lance Miller, Thomas Erben, Hendrik Hildebrandt, Henk Hoekstra, Thomas D. Kitching, Yannick Mellier, Patrick Simon, Christopher Bonnett, Jean Coupon, Liping Fu, Joachim Harnois-D'eraps, Michael J. Hudson, Martin Kilbinger, Koenraad Kuijken, Barnaby Rowe, Tim Schrabback, Elisabetta Semboloni, Edo van Uitert, Sanaz Vafaei, Malin Velander

We present the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) that accurately determines a weak gravitational lensing signal from the full 154 square degrees of deep multi-colour data obtained by the CFHT Legacy Survey. Weak gravitational lensing by large-scale structure is widely recognised as one of the most powerful but technically challenging probes of cosmology. We outline the CFHTLenS analysis pipeline, describing how and why every step of the chain from the raw pixel data to the lensing shear and photometric redshift measurement has been revised and improved compared to previous analyses of a subset of the same data. We present a novel method to identify data which contributes a non-negligible contamination to our sample and quantify the required level of calibration for the survey. Through a series of cosmology-insensitive tests we demonstrate the robustness of the resulting cosmic shear signal, presenting a science-ready shear and photometric redshift catalogue for future exploitation.

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