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Published July 2019 | Published
Journal Article Open

A Mosaic of TESS Images Acquired Near The South Ecliptic Pole

Abstract

The primary goal of the two-year Transiting Exoplanet Sky Survey (TESS) mission is to discover new, nearby exoplanet systems (Ricker et al. 2015). The mission acquires images every 30 minutes, through a single broadband filter and with four cameras. It offers a unique opportunity to study the diffuse universe. Holwerda (2018) showed it can in principle allow studies of topics such as the derivation of the halo mass profiles of nearby galaxies (essentially those in the NGC and UGC catalogs); tests of Lambda-CDM galaxy formation scenarios; derivation of stellar halo fractions for galaxies of different masses and morphologies; identification of local stellar streams that cross over multiple TESS observing sectors and other galaxy cannibalism leftovers; detection of ultra-diffuse galaxies as companions to bigger galaxies; and searches for supernovae remnants and planetary nebulae. With such science goals in mind, we have constructed a first-look, science-ready mosaic of a subset of the images released by TESS, to inform the processing and storage requirements of a mosaic of the southern sky, planned for Fall 2019. The mosaic covers the continuous viewing zone near the south ecliptic pole. In response to community requests, the mosaic is freely available at https://doi.org/10.26134/ExoFOP4 along with tools for downloading the data. This paper describes the creation of the mosaic and its characteristics.

Additional Information

© 2019 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2019 July 11; Accepted 2019 July 9; Published 2019 July 11. This paper includes data collected with the TESS mission, obtained from the MAST data archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). Funding for the TESS mission is provided by the NASA Explorer Program. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5–26555. The images were processed with Montage. It is funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers ACI-1440620, 1642453 and 1835379, and was previously funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Earth Science Technology Office, Computation Technologies Project, under Cooperative Agreement Number NCC5-626 between NASA and the California Institute of Technology. We thank Steve Groom and David Flynn for systems support, and Dr. William Keel for technical discussions. Software: http://montage.ipac.caltech.edu The Montage image mosaic engine; code repository at https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/Montage.

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August 22, 2023
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