Berkeley Supernova Ia Program – I. Observations, data reduction and spectroscopic sample of 582 low-redshift Type Ia supernovae
Abstract
In this first paper in a series, we present 1298 low-redshift (z ≲ 0.2) optical spectra of 582 Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) observed from 1989 to 2008 as part of the Berkeley Supernova Ia Program (BSNIP). 584 spectra of 199 SNe Ia have well-calibrated light curves with measured distance moduli, and many of the spectra have been corrected for host-galaxy contamination. Most of the data were obtained using the Kast double spectrograph mounted on the Shane 3 m telescope at Lick Observatory and have a typical wavelength range of 3300–10 400 Å, roughly twice as wide as spectra from most previously published data sets. We present our observing and reduction procedures, and we describe the resulting SN Database, which will be an online, public, searchable data base containing all of our fully reduced spectra and companion photometry. In addition, we discuss our spectral classification scheme (using the SuperNova IDentification code, snid; Blondin & Tonry), utilizing our newly constructed set of snid spectral templates. These templates allow us to accurately classify our entire data set, and by doing so we are able to reclassify a handful of objects as bona fide SNe Ia and a few other objects as members of some of the peculiar SN Ia subtypes. In fact, our data set includes spectra of nearly 90 spectroscopically peculiar SNe Ia. We also present spectroscopic host-galaxy redshifts of some SNe Ia where these values were previously unknown. The sheer size of the BSNIP data set and the consistency of our observation and reduction methods make this sample unique among all other published SN Ia data sets and complementary in many ways to the large, low-redshift SN Ia spectra presented by Matheson et al. and Blondin et al. In other BSNIP papers in this series, we use these data to examine the relationships between spectroscopic characteristics and various observables such as photometric and host-galaxy properties.
Additional Information
© 2012 The Authors. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2012 RAS. Accepted 2012 May 8. Received 2012 May 4; in original form 2012 February 8. Article first published online: 27 Aug. 2012. We would like to thank K. Alatalo, L. Armus, M. Baker, M. Bentz, E. Berger, M. Bershady, A. Blum, A. Burgasser, N. Butler, G. Canalizo, H. Chen, M. Cooper, C. DeBreuck, M. Dickinson, R. Eastman, M. Eracleous, S. Faber, X. Fan, C. Fassnacht, P. Garnavich, M. George, D. Gilbank, A. Gilbert, K. Glazebrook, J. Graham, G. Graves, R. Green, J. Greene, M. Gregg, M. Hidas, K. Hiner, W. Ho, J. Hoffman, I. Hook, D. Hutchings, V. Junkkarinen, L. Kewley, R. Kirshner, D. Kocevski, S. Kulkarni, M. Lehnert, B. Leibundgut, M. Malkan, A. Martel, M. McCourt, A. Miller, E. Moran, P. Nandra, J. Newman, K. Noeske, C. Papovich, C. Peng, S. Perlmutter, M. Phillips, D. Pooley, H. Pugh, E. Quataert, M. Rich, M. Richmond, A. Riess, S. Rodney, K. Sandstrom, W. Sargent, K. Shimasaki, R. Simcoe, T. Small, G. Smith, H. Smith, H. Spinrad, G. Squires, C. Steidel, D. Stern, D. Stevens, R. Street, C. Thornton, T. Treu, B. Tucker, D. Tytler, W. van Breugel, V. Virgilio, V. Viscomi, N. Vogt, J. Walsh, D. Weisz, C. Willmer, A. Wolfe and J.-H. Woo for their assistance with some of the observations over the last two decades. We would also like to thank J. Choi, M. Ellison, L. Jewett, A. Morton, X. Parisky and P. Thrasher for helping to verify some of the information in the SNDB. Moreover, we thank the referee for comments and suggestions that improved the manuscript.We are grateful to the staff at the Lick and Keck Observatories for their support. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M.Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); the observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always hadwithin the indigenous Hawaiian community; we are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Data base (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. AVF's group is supported by the NSF grant AST-0908886, DOE grants DE-FC02-06ER41453 (SciDAC) and DEFG02-08ER41563, and the TABASGO Foundation. MM acknowledges support from Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF-51277.01-A, awarded by STScI, which is operated by AURA under NASA contract NAS5-26555, for the time during which some of this work was conducted. KAIT and its ongoing operation were made possible by donations from Sun Microsystems, Inc., the Hewlett-Packard Company, AutoScope Corporation, Lick Observatory, the NSF, the University of California, the Sylvia & Jim Katzman Foundation and the TABASGO Foundation. We would like to dedicate this paper to the memory of Marc J. Staley, who never stopped asking the Great Questions.Attached Files
Published - mnr21270.pdf
Supplemental Material - mnr_21270_sm_Plots.zip
Supplemental Material - mnr_21270_sm_Table1257.zip
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 35392
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20121109-132036445
- AST-0908886
- NSF
- DE-FC02-06ER41453
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- DEFG02-08ER41563
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- TABASGO Foundation
- HST-HF-51277.01-A
- NASA Hubble Fellowship
- NAS5-26555
- NASA
- Created
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2012-11-09Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)