Intermediate Strength Gravitational Lensing

Weak lensing is found in the correlations of shear in 104 galaxy images, strong lensing is detected by the obvious distortion of a single galaxy image, whereas intermediate lensing requires detection of less obvious curvature in several neighboring galaxies. Small impact-parameter lensing causes a sextupole distortion whose orientation is correlated with the quadrupole distortion (shear). By looking within a field for the spatial correlation of this sextupole-quadrupole correlation, an intermediate lensing regime is observed. This technique requires correction for the sextupole as well as the quadrupole content of the PSF. We remove the HST PSF and uncover intermediate lensing in the Hubble deep fields. Correlations of the type expected are found.