The Subaru Strategic Program ( SSP ) is an ambitious multi-band survey using the Hyper Suprime-Cam ( HSC ) on the Subaru telescope .
The Wide layer of the SSP is both wide and deep , reaching a detection limit of i { \sim } 26.0 mag .
At these depths , it is challenging to achieve accurate , unbiased , and consistent photometry across all five bands .
The HSC data are reduced using a pipeline that builds on the prototype pipeline for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope .
We have developed a Python -based , flexible framework to inject synthetic galaxies into real HSC images called SynPipe .
Here we explain the design and implementation of SynPipe and generate a sample of synthetic galaxies to examine the photometric performance of the HSC pipeline .
For stars , we achieve 1 % photometric precision at i { \sim } 19.0 mag and 6 % precision at i { \sim } 25.0 in the i -band ( corresponding to statistical scatters of { \sim } 0.01 and { \sim } 0.06 mag respectively ) .
For synthetic galaxies with single-Sérsic profiles , forced cModel photometry achieves 13 % photometric precision at i { \sim } 20.0 mag and 18 % precision at i { \sim } 25.0 in the i -band ( corresponding to statistical scatters of { \sim } 0.15 and { \sim } 0.22 mag respectively ) .
We show that both forced PSF and cModel photometry yield unbiased color estimates that are robust to seeing conditions .
We identify several caveats that apply to the version of HSC pipeline used for the first public HSC data release ( DR1 ) that need to be taking into consideration .
First , the degree to which an object is blended with other objects impacts the overall photometric performance .
This is especially true for point sources .
Highly blended objects tend to have larger photometric uncertainties , systematically underestimated fluxes and slightly biased colors .
Second , > 20 % of stars at 22.5 < i < 25.0 mag can be misclassified as extended objects .
Third , the current cModel algorithm tends to strongly underestimate the half-light radius and ellipticity of galaxy with i > 21.5 mag .