VizieR Online Data Catalog: IRAC HUDF and GOODS ultradeep surveys (Labbe+, 2015)

The IRAC ultradeep field and IRAC Legacy over GOODS programs are two ultradeep imaging surveys at 3.6 and 4.5μm with the Spitzer Infrared Array Camera (IRAC). The primary aim is to directly detect the infrared light of reionization epoch galaxies at z>7 and to constrain their stellar populations. The observations cover the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), including the two HUDF parallel fields, and the CANDELS/GOODS-South, and are combined with archival data from all previous deep programs into one ultradeep data set. The resulting imaging reaches unprecedented coverage in IRAC 3.6 and 4.5μm ranging from >50hr over 150arcmin², >100hr over 60sq arcmin², to ~200hr over 5-10arcmin². This paper presents the survey description, data reduction, and public release of reduced mosaics on the same astrometric system as the CANDELS/GOODS-South Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) data. To facilitate prior-based WFC3+IRAC photometry, we introduce a new method to create high signal-to-noise PSFs from the IRAC data and reconstruct the complex spatial variation due to survey geometry. The PSF maps are included in the release, as are registered maps of subsets of the data to enable reliability and variability studies. Simulations show that the noise in the ultradeep IRAC images decreases approximately as the square root of integration time over the range 20-200hr, well below the classical confusion limit, reaching 1σ point-source sensitivities as faint as 15nJy (28.5 AB) at 3.6μm and 18nJy (28.3 AB) at 4.5μm. The value of such ultradeep IRAC data is illustrated by direct detections of z=7-8 galaxies as faint as H_AB=28.

(1 data file).