The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE)
Abstract
The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), one of the programs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), has now completed its systematic, homogeneous spectroscopic survey sampling all major populations of the Milky Way. After a three year observing campaign on the Sloan 2.5-m Telescope, APOGEE has collected a half million high resolution (R~22,500), high S/N (>100), infrared (1.51-1.70 microns) spectra for 146,000 stars, with time series information via repeat visits to most of these stars. This paper describes the motivations for the survey and its overall design---hardware, field placement, target selection, operations---and gives an overview of these aspects as well as the data reduction, analysis and products. An index is also given to the complement of technical papers that describe various critical survey components in detail. Finally, we discuss the achieved survey performance and illustrate the variety of potential uses of the data products by way of a number of science demonstrations, which span from time series analysis of stellar spectral variations and radial velocity variations from stellar companions, to spatial maps of kinematics, metallicity and abundance patterns across the Galaxy and as a function of age, to new views of the interstellar medium, the chemistry of star clusters, and the discovery of rare stellar species. As part of SDSS-III Data Release 12, all of the APOGEE data products are now publicly available.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1509.05420,
title = {The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE)},
author = {Steven R. Majewski and Ricardo P. Schiavon and Peter M. Frinchaboy and Carlos Allende Prieto and Robert Barkhouser and Dmitry Bizyaev and Basil Blank and Sophia Brunner and Adam Burton and Ricardo Carrera and S. Drew Chojnowski and Katia Cunha and Courtney Epstein and Greg Fitzgerald and Ana E. Garcia Perez and Fred R. Hearty and Chuck Henderson and Jon A. Holtzman and Jennifer A. Johnson and Charles R. Lam and James E. Lawler and Paul Maseman and Szabolcs Meszaros and Matthew Nelson and Duy Coung Nguyen and David L. Nidever and Marc Pinsonneault and Matthew Shetrone and Stephen Smee and Verne V. Smith and Todd Stolberg and Michael F. Skrutskie and Eric Walker and John C. Wilson and Gail Zasowski and Friedrich Anders and Sarbani Basu and Stephane Beland and Michael R. Blanton and Jo Bovy and Joel R. Brownstein and Joleen Carlberg and William Chaplin and Cristina Chiappini and Daniel J. Eisenstein and Yvonne Elsworth and Diane Feuillet and Scott W. Fleming and Jessica Galbraith-Frew and Rafael A. Garcia and D. Anibal Garcia-Hernandez and Bruce A. Gillespie and Leo Girardi and James E. Gunn and Sten Hasselquist and Michael R. Hayden and Saskia Hekker and Inese Ivans and Karen Kinemuchi and Mark Klaene and Suvrath Mahadevan and Savita Mathur and Benoit Mosser and Demitri Muna and Jeffrey A. Munn and Robert C. Nichol and Robert W. O'Connell and A. C. Robin and Helio Rocha-Pinto and Matthias Schultheis and Aldo M. Serenelli and Neville Shane and Victor Silva Aguirre and Jennifer S. Sobeck and Benjamin Thompson and Nicholas W. Troup and David H. Weinberg and Olga Zamora},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.05420},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
Submitted to The Astronomical Journal: 50 pages, including 38 figures, 4 tables, and 5 appendices