Euclid preparation: LXXXIV. The flat-sky approximation for the clustering of Euclids photometric galaxies

Abstract

We compared the performance of the flat-sky approximation and Limber approximation for the clustering analysis of the photometric galaxy catalogue of Euclid. We studied a 6-bin configuration, representing the first data release (DR1), and a 13-bin configuration, representing the third and final data release (DR3). We find that the Limber approximation is sufficiently accurate for the analysis of the wide bins of DR1. Instead, the 13 bins of DR3 cannot be modelled accurately with the Limber approximation. Instead, the flat-sky approximation is accurate to below 5% in recovering the angular power spectra of galaxy number counts in both cases and can be used to simplify the computation of the full power spectrum in harmonic space for the data analysis of DR3.