We present the first data release (DR1) of the SkyMapper Southern Survey, a hemispheric survey carried out with the SkyMapper Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. Here, we present the survey strategy, data processing, catalogue construction and database schema. The DR1 dataset includes over 66,000 images from the Shallow Survey component, covering an area of 17,200 deg2 in all six SkyMapper passbands uvgriz, while the full area covered by any passband exceeds 20,000 deg2. The catalogues contain over 285 million unique astrophysical objects, complete to roughly 18 mag in all bands. We compare our griz point-source photometry with PanSTARRS1 DR1 and note an RMS scatter of 2%. The internal reproducibility of SkyMapper photometry is on the order of 1%. Astrometric precision is better than 0.2 arcsec based on comparison with Gaia DR1. We describe the end-user database, through which data are presented to the world community, and provide some illustrative science queries.
@article{arxiv.1801.07834,
title = {SkyMapper Southern Survey: First Data Release (DR1)},
author = {Christian Wolf and Christopher A. Onken and Lance C. Luvaul and Brian P. Schmidt and Michael S. Bessell and Seo-Won Chang and Gary S. Da Costa and Dougal Mackey and Tony Martin-Jones and Simon J. Murphy and Tim Preston and Richard A. Scalzo and Li Shao and Jon Smillie and Patrick Tisserand and Marc C. White and Fang Yuan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.07834},
year = {2018}
}