Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys

2019/04/09 by Arjun Dey, David J. Schlegel, Dustin Lang +158 · 176 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #CCD and CMOS Imaging Sensors #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae

paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-3881/ab089d

Abstract

Abstract The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys ( http://legacysurvey.org/ ) are a combination of three public projects (the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey, the Beijing–Arizona Sky Survey, and the Mayall z -band Legacy Survey) that will jointly image ≈14,000 deg 2 of the extragalactic sky visible from the northern hemisphere in three optical bands ( g , r , and z ) using telescopes at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The combined survey footprint is split into two contiguous areas by the Galactic plane. The optical imaging is conducted using a unique strategy of dynamically adjusting the exposure times and pointing selection during observing that results in a survey of nearly uniform depth. In addition to calibrated images, the project is delivering a catalog, constructed by using a probabilistic inference-based approach to estimate source shapes and brightnesses. The catalog includes photometry from the grz optical bands and from four mid-infrared bands (at 3.4, 4.6, 12, and 22 μ m) observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite during its full operational lifetime. The project plans two public data releases each year. All the software used to generate the catalogs is also released with the data. This paper provides an overview of the Legacy Surveys project.

Citations

• THE WIDE-FIELD INFRARED SURVEY EXPLORER (WISE): MISSION DESCRIPTION AND INITIAL ON-ORBIT PERFORMANCE

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• Electromagnetic follow-up of gravitational waves: review and lessons learned. [europepmc]
• Orbiting, colliding, and merging liquid lenses on a soap film: Toward gravitational analogs. [europepmc]
• JWST detection of heavy neutron capture elements in a compact object merger [europepmc]
• Black hole jets on the scale of the Cosmic Web [europepmc]

Related

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