Weak gravitational lensing by a sample of X-ray luminous clusters of galaxies. I. The data set

We present weak gravitational lensing mass measurements of a sample of 38 highly X-ray luminous clusters of galaxies with well-defined selection criteria. The clusters were observed with either monolithic 2048 2 CCDs, the UH8K mosaic CCD camera, or both. The weak shear caused by gravitational lensing was measured using recently developed techniques to correct for the effects of realistic point-spread functions and to optimally weight the contribution of each galaxy to the final shear estimate. The results are presented in the form of maps of the reconstructed dimensionless surface density and plots of the radial cluster mass proles. The maps are compared to mass-traces-light predictions for based on two-color, V- and I-band galaxy photometry in the observed fields. About 30% of the clusters in our sample show evidence of significant dynamical activity related to mergers of subclumps. More than half of the clusters show signs of strong lensing. Our data set more than doubles the total number of galaxy clusters with a detected weak lensing signal. The data for all the clusters have been reduced and analyzed in a consistent way, and this makes our data set uniquely suitable for statistical studies of cluster properties, which will be the subject of future papers in this series.