The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) III project, has provided the largest survey of galaxy redshifts available to date, in terms of both the number of galaxy redshifts measured by a single survey, and the effective cosmological volume covered. Key to analysing the clustering of these data to provide cosmological measurements is understanding the detailed properties of this sample. Potential issues include variations in the target catalogue caused by changes either in the targeting algorithm or properties of the data used, the pattern of spectroscopic observations, the spatial distribution of targets for which redshifts were not obtained, and variations in the target sky density due to observational systematics. We document here the target selection algorithms used to create the galaxy samples that comprise BOSS. We also present the algorithms used to create large scale structure catalogues for the final Data Release (DR12) samples and the associated random catalogues that quantify the survey mask. The algorithms are an evolution of those used by the BOSS team to construct catalogues from earlier data, and have been designed to accurately quantify the galaxy sample. The code used, designated MKSAMPLE, is released with this paper.
@article{arxiv.1509.06529,
title = {SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey Data Release 12: galaxy target selection and large scale structure catalogues},
author = {Beth Reid and Shirley Ho and Nikhil Padmanabhan and Will J. Percival and Jeremy Tinker and Rita Tojeiro and Martin White and Daniel J. Eisenstein and Claudia Maraston and Ashley J. Ross and Ariel G. Sanchez and David Schlegel and Erin Sheldon and Michael A. Strauss and Daniel Thomas and David Wake and Florian Beutler and Dmitry Bizyaev and Adam S. Bolton and Joel R. Brownstein and Chia-Hsun Chuang and Kyle Dawson and Paul Harding and Francisco-Shu Kitaura and Alexie Leauthaud and Karen Masters and Cameron K. McBride and Surhud More and Matthew D. Olmstead and Daniel Oravetz and Sebastian E. Nuza and Kaike Pan and John Parejko and Janine Pforr and Francisco Prada and Sergio Rodriguez-Torres and Salvador Salazar-Albornoz and Lado Samushia and Donald P. Schneider and Claudia G. Scoccola and Audrey Simmons and Mariana Vargas-Magana},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.06529},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
21 pages, 12 figures, version accepted for publication in MNRAS