Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys
Abstract
The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys 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 approximately 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 micorons) observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite 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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1804.08657,
title = {Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys},
author = {Arjun Dey and David J. Schlegel and Dustin Lang and Robert Blum and Kaylan Burleigh and Xiaohui Fan and Joseph R. Findlay and Doug Finkbeiner and David Herrera and Stephanie Juneau and Martin Landriau and Michael Levi and Ian McGreer and Aaron Meisner and Adam D. Myers and John Moustakas and Peter Nugent and Anna Patej and Edward F. Schlafly and Alistair R. Walker and Francisco Valdes and Benjamin A. Weaver and Christophe Yeche Hu Zou and Xu Zhou and Behzad Abareshi and T. M. C. Abbott and Bela Abolfathi and C. Aguilera and Shadab Alam and Lori Allen and A. Alvarez and James Annis and Behzad Ansarinejad and Marie Aubert and Jacqueline Beechert and Eric F. Bell and Segev Y. BenZvi and Florian Beutler and Richard M. Bielby and Adam S. Bolton and Cesar Briceno Elizabeth J. Buckley-Geer and Karen Butler and Annalisa Calamida and Raymond G. Carlberg and Paul Carter and Ricard Casas and Francisco J. Castander and Yumi Choi and Johan Comparat and Elena Cukanovaite and Timothee Delubac and Kaitlin DeVries and Sharmila Dey and Govinda Dhungana and Mark Dickinson and Zhejie Ding and John B. Donaldson and Yutong Duan and Christopher J. Duckworth and Sarah Eftekharzadeh and Daniel J. Eisenstein and Thomas Etourneau and Parker A. Fagrelius and Jay Farihi and Mike Fitzpatrick and Andreu Font-Ribera and Leah Fulmer and Boris T. Gansicke and Enrique Gaztanaga and Koshy George and David W. Gerdes and Satya Gontcho A Gontcho and Claudio Gorgoni and Gregory Green and Julien Guy and Diane Harmer and M. Hernandez and Klaus Honscheid and Lijuan and Huang and David James and Buell T. Jannuzi and Linhua Jiang and Richard Joyce and Armin Karcher and Sonia Karkar and Robert Kehoe and Jean-Paul Kneib and Andrea Kueter-Young and Ting-Wen Lan and Tod Lauer and Laurent Le Guillou and Auguste Le Van Suu and Jae Hyeon Lee and Michael Lesser and Laurence Perreault Levasseur and Ting S. Li and Justin L. Mann and Bob Marshall and C. E. Martinez-Vazquez and Paul Martini and Helion du Mas des Bourboux and Sean McManus and Tobias Gabriel Meier and Brice Menard and Nigel Metcalfe and Andrea Munoz-Gutierrez and Joan Najita and Kevin Napier and Gautham Narayan and Jeffrey A. Newman and Jundan Nie and Brian Nord and Dara J. Norman and Knut A. G. Olsen and Anthony Paat and Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille and Xiyan Peng and Claire L. Poppett and Megan R. Poremba and Abhishek Prakash and David Rabinowitz and Anand Raichoor and Mehdi Rezaie and A. N. Robertson and Natalie A. Roe and Ashley J. Ross and Nicholas P. Ross and Gregory Rudnick and Sasha Safonova and Abhijit Saha and F. Javier Sanchez and Elodie Savary and Heidi Schweiker and Adam Scott and Hee-Jong Seo and Huanyuan Shan and David R. Silva and Zachary Slepian and Christian Soto and David Sprayberry and Ryan Staten and Coley M. Stillman and Robert J. Stupak and David L. Summers and Suk Sien Tie and H. Tirado and Mariana Vargas-Magana and A. Katherina Vivas and Risa H. Wechsler and Doug Williams and Jinyi Yang and Qian Yang and Tolga Yapici and Dennis Zaritsky and A. Zenteno and Kai Zhang and Tianmeng Zhang and Rongpu Zhou and Zhimin Zhou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.08657},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
47 pages, 18 figures; accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal