The Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE): first data release
Abstract
We present the first data release of the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), an ambitious spectroscopic survey to measure radial velocities and stellar atmosphere parameters (temperature, metallicity, surface gravity) of up to one million stars using the 6dF multi-object spectrograph on the 1.2-m UK Schmidt Telescope of the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO). The RAVE program started in 2003, obtaining medium resolution spectra (median R=7,500) in the Ca-triplet region ( 8,410--8,795 \AA) for southern hemisphere stars drawn from the Tycho-2 and SuperCOSMOS catalogs, in the magnitude range 9<I<12. The first data release is described in this paper and contains radial velocities for 24,748 individual stars (25,274 measurements when including re-observations). Those data were obtained on 67 nights between 11 April 2003 to 03 April 2004. The total sky coverage within this data release is 4,760 square degrees. The average signal to noise ratio of the observed spectra is 29.5, and 80% of the radial velocities have uncertainties better than 3.4 km/s. Combining internal errors and zero-point errors, the mode is found to be 2 km/s. Repeat observations are used to assess the stability of our radial velocity solution, resulting in a variance of 2.8 km/s. We demonstrate that the radial velocities derived for the first data set do not show any systematic trend with color or signal to noise. The RAVE radial velocities are complemented in the data release with proper motions from Starnet 2.0, Tycho-2 and SuperCOSMOS, in addition to photometric data from the major optical and infrared catalogs (Tycho-2, USNO-B, DENIS and 2MASS). The data release can be accessed via the RAVE webpage: http://www.rave-survey.org.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0606211,
title = {The Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE): first data release},
author = {M. Steinmetz and T. Zwitter and A. Siebert and F. G. Watson and K. C. Freeman and U. Munari and R. Campbell and M. Williams and G. M. Seabroke and R. F. G. Wyse and Q. A. Parker and O. Bienayme and S. Roeser and B. K. Gibson and G. Gilmore and E. K. Grebel and A. Helmi and J. F. Navarro and D. Burton and C. J. P. Cass and J. A. Dawe and K. Fiegert and M. Hartley and K. S. Russell and W. Saunders and H. Enke and J. Bailin and J. Binney and J. Bland-Hawthorn and C. Boeche and W. Dehnen and D. J. Eisenstein and N. W. Evans and M. Fiorucci and J. P. Fulbright and O. Gerhard and U. Jauregi and A. Kelz and L. Mijovic and I. Minchev and G. Parmentier and J. Penarrubia and A. C. Quillen and M. A. Read and G. Ruchti and R. -D. Scholz and A. Siviero and M. C. Smith and R. Sordo and L. Veltz and S. Vidrih and R. von Berlepsch and B. J. Boyle and E. Schilbach},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0606211},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
Astronomical Journal, accepted, 87 pages, 22 figures