ABYSS HUDF WFC3 IR mosaics

With the main objective of unveiling the nature of galaxies up to z~7-8, the observing and reduction strategy have focused on the properties of small and unresolved objects, rather than the outskirts of the largest objects, which are usually over-subtracted. We aim to create a new set of WFC3 IR mosaics of the HUDF using novel techniques to preserve the properties of the low surface brightness regions.

We created ABYSS a pipeline that optimises the estimate and modelling of low-level systematic effects to obtain a robust background subtraction. We have improved four key points in the reduction: 1) creation of new absolute sky flat fields, 2) extended persistence models, 3) dedicated sky background subtraction and 4) robust co-adding. The new mosaics successfully recover the low surface brightness structure removed on the previous HUDF published reductions.