  We report a detection of the coherent distortion of faint galaxies arising
from gravitational lensing by foreground structures. This ``cosmic shear'' is
potentially the most direct measure of the mass power spectrum, as it is
unaffected by poorly-justified assumptions made concerning the biasing of the
distribution. Our detection is based on an initial imaging study of 14
separated 8' x 16' fields observed in good, homogeneous conditions with the
prime focus EEV CCD camera of the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope. We detect an
rms shear of 1.6% in 8' x 8' cells, with a significance of 3.4 sigma. We
carefully justify this detection by quantifying various systematic effects and
carrying out extensive simulations of the recovery of the shear signal from
artificial images defined according to measured instrument characteristics. We
also verify our detection by computing the cross-correlation between the shear
in adjacent cells. Including (gaussian) cosmic variance, we measure the shear
variance to be (0.016)^2 plus/minus (0.012)^2 plus/minus (0.006)^2, where these
1 sigma errors correspond to statistical and systematic uncertainties,
respectively. Our measurements are consistent with the predictions of
cluster-normalised CDM models (within 1 sigma) but a COBE-normalised SCDM model
is ruled out at the 3.0 sigma level. For the currently-favoured Lambda-CDM
model (with Omega_m = 0.3), our measurement provides a normalisation of the
mass power spectrum of sigma_8 = 1.5 plus/minus 0.5, fully consistent with that
derived from cluster abundances. Our result demonstrates that ground-based
telescopes can, with adequate care, be used to constrain the mass power
spectrum on various scales. The present results are limited mainly by cosmic
variance, which can be overcome in the near future with more observations.

Astrophysics