Optimal strategy for low surface brightness imaging with KMTNet

Most galaxies are believed to evolve through mergers and accretions. In particular, minor mergers and gas accretion appear to play an important role in galaxy evolution in the present-day Universe. Tidally-disrupted debris from such processes remain as diffuse, low-surface brightness structures because the dynamical timescale in the outskirts is significantly longer than that in the central regions. Although these structures will give us useful insight into the mass assembly history of galaxies, it is difficult to detect them due to their faint surface brightness. In order to investigate the structural properties of outskirts in nearby galaxies, we conduct deep and wide-field imaging survey with KMTNet. We present our observing strategy and an optimal data reduction process to recover faint extended features in the images of KMTNet. Using the imaging data of NGC 1291 obtained from KMTNet, we find that a peak-to-peak sky gradient can be reduced less than 0.4-0.6% of the original sky level in the entire image. We also find that we can reach the surface brightness of ${\mu}_{(B,1{\sigma})}$ ~ 29.5, ${\mu}_{(R,1{\sigma})}$ ~ 28.5 mag $arcsec^{-2}$ in one-dimensional profile, that is mainly limited by the uncertainty in the sky determination. It indicates that deep imaging data of KMTNet is suitable to study the extended faint features of nearby galaxies, such as stellar halos, outer disks, and dwarf companions.