The ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury
Abstract
The ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury (ANGST) is a systematic survey to establish a legacy of uniform multi-color photometry of resolved stars for a volume-limited sample of nearby galaxies (D < 4 Mpc). The survey volume encompasses 69 galaxies in diverse environments, including close pairs, small and large groups, filaments, and truly isolated regions. The galaxies include a nearly complete range of morphological types spanning a factor of ~104 in luminosity and star formation rate. The survey data consist of images taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), supplemented with archival data and new Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) imaging taken after the failure of ACS. Survey images include wide field tilings covering the full radial extent of each galaxy, and single deep pointings in uncrowded regions of the most massive galaxies in the volume. The new wide field imaging in ANGST reaches median 50% completenesses of m F475W = 28.0 mag, m F606W = 27.3 mag, and m F814W = 27.3 mag, several magnitudes below the tip of the red giant branch (TRGB). The deep fields reach magnitudes sufficient to fully resolve the structure in the red clump. The resulting photometric catalogs are publicly accessible and contain over 34 million photometric measurements of >14 million stars. In this paper we present the details of the sample selection, imaging, data reduction, and the resulting photometric catalogs, along with an analysis of the photometric uncertainties (systematic and random), for both ACS and WFPC2 imaging. We also present uniformly derived relative distances measured from the apparent magnitude of the TRGB.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series
- Pub Date:
- July 2009
- DOI:
- 10.1088/0067-0049/183/1/67
- arXiv:
- arXiv:0905.3737
- Bibcode:
- 2009ApJS..183...67D
- Keywords:
-
- catalogs;
- galaxies: formation;
- galaxies: stellar content;
- surveys;
- Astrophysics - Galaxy Astrophysics;
- Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 54 pages, including 24 pages of figures and 16 pages of tables. Project website and data available at http://www.nearbygalaxies.org/ . Data is also available through MAST. Scheduled to appear in the Astrophysical Journal Supplements. (Replaced to fix several figures that were damaged during compression)