The Stability of the Point Spread Function of the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope and Implications for Weak Gravitational Lensing

(abridged) We examine the spatial and temporal stability of the HST ACS Wide Field Camera (WFC) point spread function (PSF) using the two square degree COSMOS survey. We show that stochastic aliasing of the PSF necessarily occurs during `drizzling'. This aliasing is maximal if the output pixel scale is equal to the input pixel scale of 0.05''. We show that this source of PSF variation can be significantly reduced by choosing a Gaussian drizzle kernel and by setting the output pixel size to 0.03''. We show that the PSF is temporally unstable, most likely due to thermal fluctuations in the telescope's focus. We find that the primary manifestation of this thermal drift in COSMOS images is an overall slow periodic focus change. Using a modified version of TinyTim, we create undistorted stars in a 30x30 grid across the ACS WFC CCDs. These PSF models are created for telescope focus values in the range -10 microns to +5 microns, thus spanning the allowed range of telescope focus values. We then use the approximately ten well measured stars in each COSMOS field to pick the best-fit focus value for each field. The TinyTim model stars are then used to perform PSF corrections for weak lensing allowing systematics due to incorrectly modeled PSFs to be greatly reduced. We have made the software for PSF modeling using our modified version of TinyTim available to the astronomical community. We show the effects of Charge Transfer Efficiency (CTE) degradation, which distorts the object in the readout direction, mimicking a weak lensing signal. We derive a parametric correction for the effect of CTE on the shapes of objects in the COSMOS field as a function of observation date, position within the ACS WFC field, and object flux.