I just chatted with Patricia Larsen about the half-light radius convention that has been confusing for a while now. We ended up digging into the provenance of the hlr quantities all the way back up the chain.
It turns out that the quantities called size_*_true are actually the values we want for half-light-radius, and not the major axis, as it says in the GCR schema. So the line in skycatalogs where we compute hlr = sqrt(a*b) is not correct.
a = self.get_native_attribute(
f'size_{my_component}_true')
b = self.get_native_attribute(
f'size_minor_{my_component}_true')
assert a >= b
hlr = (a*b)**0.5 # approximation for half-light radius
should become simply
hlr = self.get_native_attribute(
f'size_{my_component}_true')
It also means that DC2 sizes were correct, and not too large by a factor of sqrt((1+e)/(1-e)) as we thought.
I just chatted with Patricia Larsen about the half-light radius convention that has been confusing for a while now. We ended up digging into the provenance of the hlr quantities all the way back up the chain.
It turns out that the quantities called
size_*_trueare actually the values we want for half-light-radius, and not the major axis, as it says in the GCR schema. So the line in skycatalogs where we computehlr = sqrt(a*b)is not correct.should become simply
It also means that DC2 sizes were correct, and not too large by a factor of sqrt((1+e)/(1-e)) as we thought.