Left: cutout from the co-add of the COSMOS field observed with VST in the r-band as a part of KiDS. Right: corresponding region, but now simulated under similar seeing conditions with morphological parameters of the galaxies taken from the HST COSMOS catalogue described in Sect. 4, simulated using the setup described in Sect. 3.1. The images are 1200 pixels, roughly equivalent to , on the side and are rendered in DS9 with zscale colour scale. We do not simulate the bright saturated stars that can be seen in the VST image, and choose to place additional stars at random locations. The position angles of the galaxies, as measured by GALFIT are noisy, which can be seen from the differences between the galaxy orientations in the left and right panels. The solid green circles indicate some examples of regions with distinctive patterns on the sky involving close pairs of galaxies, which we are able to replicate fairly well. The broken circles in yellow and cyan respectively highlight some objects that are not included in our simulations or not present in the original data.