Automated Detection of Dwarf Galaxies and Star Clusters in SMASH through the NOAO Data Lab

We present an automated method, using the NOAO Data Lab environment, for the detection of dwarf galaxy-scale objects in catalog data from the Survey of the Magellanic Stellar History (SMASH). SMASH has imaged ~480 square degrees of the southern sky, over a partially filled area of 2400 square degrees, to 24th mag in gri (uz~23) using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam). The NOAO Data Lab (http://datalab.noao.edu) is being developed to support community research of the massive data sets now being derived from NOAO’s wide-field telescopes, in particular DECam. A key feature of the Data Lab is the ability to perform efficient automated analysis of catalog and imaging data. Our method, which is an example of this feature, allows for the rapid search of candidate dwarf galaxies and stellar clusters in deep catalog data. Using SMASH as the catalog data source, we easily recover the previously discovered Hydra II dwarf galaxy and SMASH-I LMC globular cluster, as well as a number of other potentially interesting candidate stellar systems.