The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE)

Journal Article · Fri Sep 01 00:00:00 EDT 2017 · Astronomical Journal (Online)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/AA784D· OSTI ID:22663254

Majewski, Steven R.; Brunner, Sophia; Burton, Adam; Chojnowski, S. Drew; Pérez, Ana E. García; Hearty, Fred R.; Lam, Charles R. ^[1]; Schiavon, Ricardo P. ^[2]; Frinchaboy, Peter M. ^[3]; Prieto, Carlos Allende; Carrera, Ricardo ^[4]; Barkhouser, Robert ^[5]; Bizyaev, Dmitry ^[6]; Blank, Basil; Henderson, Chuck ^[7]; Cunha, Kátia ^[8]; Epstein, Courtney; Johnson, Jennifer A. ^[9]; Fitzgerald, Greg ^[10]; Holtzman, Jon A. ^[11] ; others, and

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1. Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4325 (United States)
2. Gemini Observatory, 670 N. A’Ohoku Place, Hilo, HI 96720 (United States)
3. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX 76129 (United States)
4. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, E-38200 La Laguna, Tenerife (Spain)
5. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218 (United States)
6. Apache Point Observatory and New Mexico State University, P.O. Box 59, Sunspot, NM, 88349-0059 (United States)
7. Pulse Ray Machining and Design, 4583 State Route 414, Beaver Dams, NY 14812 (United States)
8. Observatório Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 20921-400 (Brazil)
9. The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210 (United States)
10. New England Optical Systems, 237 Cedar Hill Street, Marlborough, MA 01752 (United States)
11. New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003 (United States)

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 signal-to-noise ratio (>100), infrared (1.51–1.70 μ m) 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 and later releases, all of the APOGEE data products are publicly available.

• OSTI ID: 22663254
• Journal Information: Astronomical Journal (Online), Vol. 154, Issue 3; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1538-3881
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
ABUNDANCE
CHEMISTRY
GALACTIC EVOLUTION
INDEXES
METALLICITY
MILKY WAY
RADIAL VELOCITY
RESOLUTION
SAMPLING
SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO
SKY
STAR CLUSTERS
STARS
TELESCOPES
TIME-SERIES ANALYSIS
VARIATIONS