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Published May 2019 | Published + Accepted Version
Journal Article Open

Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys

Abstract

The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys (http://legacysurvey.org/) are a combination of three public projects (the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey, the Beijing–Arizona Sky Survey, and the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey) that will jointly image ≈14,000 deg^2 of the extragalactic sky visible from the northern hemisphere in three optical bands (g, r, and z) using telescopes at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The combined survey footprint is split into two contiguous areas by the Galactic plane. The optical imaging is conducted using a unique strategy of dynamically adjusting the exposure times and pointing selection during observing that results in a survey of nearly uniform depth. In addition to calibrated images, the project is delivering a catalog, constructed by using a probabilistic inference-based approach to estimate source shapes and brightnesses. The catalog includes photometry from the grz optical bands and from four mid-infrared bands (at 3.4, 4.6, 12, and 22 μm) observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorersatellite during its full operational lifetime. The project plans two public data releases each year. All the software used to generate the catalogs is also released with the data. This paper provides an overview of the Legacy Surveys project.

Additional Information

© 2019 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2018 April 23; revised 2019 February 18; accepted 2019 February 18; published 2019 April 9. This paper presents observations obtained at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO Prop. ID: 2014B-0404; co-PIs: D. J. Schlegel and A. Dey), which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. This paper also includes DECam observations obtained as part of other projects, namely the Dark Energy Survey (DES, NOAO Prop. ID: 2012B-0001); and 2012B-0003, 2012B-0416, 2012B-0506, 2012B-0569, 2012B-0617, 2012B-0621, 2012B-0624, 2012B-0625, 2012B-3003, 2012B-3011, 2012B-3012, 2012B-3016, 2012B-9993, 2012B-9999, 2013A-0327, 2013A-0360, 2013A-0386, 2013A-0400, 2013A-0455, 2013A-0529, 2013A-0609, 2013A-0610, 2013A-0611, 2013A-0613, 2013A-0614, 2013A-0618, 2013A-0704, 2013A-0716, 2013A-0717, 2013A-0719, 2013A-0723, 2013A-0724, 2013A-0737, 2013A-0739, 2013A-0741, 2013A-9999, 2013B-0325, 2013B-0438, 2013B-0440, 2013B-0453, 2013B-0502, 2013B-0531, 2013B-0612, 2013B-0613, 2013B-0615, 2013B-0616, 2013B-0617, 2014A-0073, 2014A-0191, 2014A-0239, 2014A-0255, 2014A-0256, 2014A-0270, 2014A-0306, 2014A-0313, 2014A-0321, 2014A-0327, 2014A-0339, 2014A-0348, 2014A-0386, 2014A-0390, 2014A-0412, 2014A-0415, 2014A-0429, 2014A-0496, 2014A-0608, 2014A-0610, 2014A-0611, 2014A-0613, 2014A-0620, 2014A-0621, 2014A-0622, 2014A-0623, 2014A-0624, 2014A-0632, 2014A-0640, 2014B-0146, 2014B-0244, 2014B-0608, 2014B-0610, 2014B-0614, 2015B-0187. DECaLS used data obtained with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was constructed by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovacão, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Enérgeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ciències de l'Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de Física d'Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the University of Nottingham, the Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, and Texas A&M University. The Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS; NOAO Prop. ID no. 2016A-0453; PI: A. Dey) uses observations made with the Mosaic-3 camera at the Mayall 4 m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The authors are honored to be permitted to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du'ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O'odham. The Beijing–Arizona Sky Survey (BASS; NOAO Proposal ID no. 2015A-0801; PIs: Zhou Xu and Xiaohui Fan) is a key project of the Telescope Access Program (TAP), which has been funded by the National Astronomical Observatories of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Strategic Priority Research Program "The Emergence of Cosmological Structures" Grant no. XDB09000000), and the Special Fund for Astronomy from the Ministry of Finance. The BASS is also supported by the External Cooperation Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant no. 114A11KYSB20160057), and Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (Grant no. 11433005). The Bok Telescope is located on Kitt Peak and operated by Steward Observatory, University of Arizona. The Legacy Surveys imaging of the DESI footprint is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231, by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility under the same contract, and by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Astronomical Sciences under Contract no. AST-0950945 to NOAO. Travel and other support for the DECaLS and MzLS projects are provided by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the DESI Project. This publication makes use of data from the Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive, which have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant no. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation Grant no. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (and its successor, the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement no. 320964 (WDTracer). J.M. gratefully acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation grant AST-1616414. A.D. thanks the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for their generous support during the year these surveys were initiated. A.D., D.J.S., and D.L. thank the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-1066293, for their hospitality and support during summer 2015, when this work was conducted. Facilities: KPNO:Mayall (Mosaic-3) - , Steward:Bok (90Prime) - , CTIO:Blanco (DECam) - , WISE - Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, Gaia - .

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Accepted Version - 1804.08657.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023