COSMOS: Hubble Space Telescope Observations

Creators: Scoville, N.; Abraham, R. G.; Aussel, H.; Barnes, J. E.; Benson, A.; Blain, A. W.; Calzetti, D.; Comastri, A.; Capak, P.; Carilli, C.; Carlstrom, J. E.; Carollo, C. M.; Colbert, J.; Daddi, E.; Ellis, R. S.; Elvis, M.; Ewald, S. P.; Fall, M.; Franceschini, A.; Giavalisco, M.; Green, W.; Griffiths, R. E.; Guzzo, L.; Hasinger, G.; Impey, C.; Kneib, J.-P.; Koda, J.; Koekemoer, A.; Le Fèvre, O.; Lilly, S.; Liu, C. T.; McCracken, H. J.; Massey, R.; Mellier, Y.; Miyazaki, S.; Mobasher, B.; Mould, J.; Norman, C.; Refregier, A.; Renzini, A.; Rhodes, J.; Rich, M.; Sanders, D. B.; Schiminovich, D.; Schinnerer, E.; Scodeggio, M.; Sheth, K.; Shopbell, P. L.; Taniguchi, Y.; Tyson, N. D.; Urry, C. M.; van Waerbeke, L.; Vettolani, P.; White, S. D. M.; Yan, L.

Abstract

The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) was initiated with an extensive allocation (590 orbits in Cycles 12-13) using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) for high-resolution imaging. Here we review the characteristics of the HST imaging with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and parallel observations with NICMOS and WFPC2. A square field (1.8 deg^2) has been imaged with single-orbit ACS I-band F814W exposures with 50% completeness for sources 0.5" in diameter at I_(AB) = 26.0 mag. The ACS is a key part of the COSMOS survey, providing very high sensitivity and high-resolution (0.09" FWHM and 0.05" pixels) imaging and detecting a million objects. These images yield resolved morphologies for several hundred thousand galaxies. The small HST PSF also provides greatly enhanced sensitivity for weak-lensing investigations of the dark matter distribution.

Additional Information

© 2007 American Astronomical Society. Print publication: Issue 1 (2007 September); received 2006 April 24; accepted for publication 2006 June 28. The HST COSMOS Treasury program was supported through NASA grant HST-GO-09822. We wish to thank Tony Roman, Denise Taylor, and David Soderblom for their assistance in the planning and scheduling of the extensive COSMOS observations. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the entire COSMOS collaboration, consisting of more than 70 scientists. More information on the COSMOS survey is available at http://www.astro.caltech.edu/cosmos. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the excellent services provided by the NASA IPAC/IRSA staff (Anastasia Laity, Anastasia Alexov, Bruce Berriman, and John Good) in providing online archive and server capabilities for the COSMOS data sets. The COSMOS Science meeting in 2005 May was supported in part by the NSF through grant OISE-0456439. We thank Rob Kennicutt for suggestions on the manuscript. Facilities: HST (ACS), HST (NICMOS), HST (WFPC2)

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