AAS Meeting #193 - Austin, Texas, January 1999
Session 108. Gravitational Lensing
Display, Saturday, January 9, 1999, 9:20am-4:00pm, Exhibit Hall 1

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[108.06] The BTC Normal Cluster Lensing Survey

I.P. Dell'Antonio (NOAO), J.A. Tyson, D. Wittman (Bell Labs, Lucent), G. Bernstein, P. Fischer, D. Smith (U. Michigan)

Until now, direct studies of the mass distribution in clusters of galaxies via weak gravitational lensing have focused on rare optically rich or X-ray luminous clusters. We present results from a weak lensing survey of eight X-ray selected ``normal" clusters at z~0.2. The clusters were chosen to have LX \lesssim L\star,X, to match typical clusters in the nearby universe. For each cluster, we have obtained deep Bj, R and I images over a 50\arcmin\ square field using the Big Throughput Camera (BTC) CCD mosaic (Tyson, Bernstein, Blouke, & Lee 1992, SPIE 1656, 400; Wittman, etal. 1998, SPIE 3355, 626) at the Blanco 4-meter on Cerro Tololo. The multicolor photometry allows separation of foreground cluster and background galaxies. We have analyzed the statistical distortion (shear) of the faint blue background galaxy shapes in these fields and derived mass maps and radial mass profiles for each cluster. We present the first results from the survey, including the mean radial profile out to R > 3h-1 Mpc, substructure statistics, mass-to-light ratio, and statistics on the presence of other mass concentrations within our survey fields. Calibration and simulation data are also presented.


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