The DECam Legacy Survey
Abstract
The DECam Legacy Survey (DECaLS) is conducting a 3-band imaging survey of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) extragalactic footprint as part of the Legacy Survey, which is associated with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) redshift survey. The Legacy Survey covers 14000 square degrees in the g, r, and z bands and is being executed on the Blanco 4-m, Mayall 4-m, and Bok 2.3-m telescopes. For DECaLS, the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) will image the footprint overlapping SDSS in the region -20 < Dec < +30 deg, to depths of g=24.7, r=23.9, z=23.0 and will eventually cover a total of 7500 square degrees. The survey began in 2014 and will run through Spring 2017. Images and catalogs were introduced in Public Data Release 2 (DR2), which occurred in January 2016. The algorithm "Tractor" applies multi-wavelength forced photometry to DECam and WISE data to produce galaxy (and star) magnitudes (as well as shape and other information) for the catalogs. In total, the optical data in DR2 cover a disjoint footprint in 2078, 2141 and 5322 square degrees in g, r, and z bands, respectively; 1807 square degrees has been observed in all three optical filters. There are approximately 260 million unique sources in DR2 spread over 97,554 0.25 x 0.25 square degree bricks.The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will observe 30+ million galaxies and quasars in a 14,000 square degree extragalactic footprint. The targeting in that footprint will be provided by a combination of these DECam data, the MOSAIC camera on the Mayall 4-meter, and the 90Prime camera on the Bok telescope.
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #228
- Pub Date:
- June 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AAS...22831701B