Meausurement of Sky Suface Brightness Fluctuations at lambda = 4 micron

Abstract

We present a Monte-Carlo technique to probe the cosmic Infrared background radiation (CIB) with faint source confusion in deep, wide-field 4 micron images. We report a detection of surface brightness fluctuations using an ensemble of 5000 pixels. The brightness fluctuations do not show correlated structure and appear to be dominated by galaxies. We estimate a lower limit (95% C.L.) on CIB by modeling the number-count behavior of contributing sources to the detected fluctuations.

25 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, accepted by ApJ, figure 7 modified, figure 8 added