SpIES: The Spitzer IRAC Equatorial Survey

Journal Article · Fri Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2016 · Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series

DOI:https://doi.org/10.3847/0067-0049/225/1/1· OSTI ID:22872489

Timlin, John D.; Ross, Nicholas P.; Richards, Gordon T.; Stone, Robert B. ^[1]; Lacy, Mark ^[2]; Ryan, Erin L. ^[3]; Bauer, Franz E. ^[4]; Brandt, W. N.; Schneider, Donald P. ^[5]; Fan, Xiaohui ^[6]; Glikman, Eilat ^[7]; Haggard, Daryl ^[8]; Jiang, Linhua ^[9]; LaMassa, Stephanie M.; Urry, C. Megan ^[10]; Lin, Yen-Ting ^[11]; Makler, Martin ^[12]; McGehee, Peregrine ^[13]; Myers, Adam D. ^[14]; others, and

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1. Department of Physics, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (United States)
2. National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 520 Edgemont Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903 (United States)
3. University of Maryland Department of Astronomy, College Park, MD 20742 (United States)
4. Instituto de Astrofísica, Facultad de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Casilla 306, Santiago 22 (Chile)
5. Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 525 Davey Lab, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 (United States)
6. Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721 (United States)
7. Department of Physics, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753 (United States)
8. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Amherst College, Amherst, MA 01002-5000 (United States)
9. Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University, Beijing 100871 (China)
10. NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771 (United States)
11. Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei 106, Taiwan (China)
12. Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas, Rua Dr. Xavier Sigaud 150, CEP 22290-180, Rio de Janeiro, RJ (Brazil)
13. IPAC, 1200 E. California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91125 (United States)
14. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Wyoming, 1000 University Avenue, Laramie, WY 82071 (United States)

We describe the first data release from the Spitzer-IRAC Equatorial Survey (SpIES); a large-area survey of ∼115 deg{sup 2} in the Equatorial SDSS Stripe 82 field using Spitzer during its “warm” mission phase. SpIES was designed to probe sufficient volume to perform measurements of quasar clustering and the luminosity function at z ⩾ 3 to test various models for “feedback” from active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Additionally, the wide range of available multi-wavelength, multi-epoch ancillary data enables SpIES to identify both high-redshift (z ⩾ 5) quasars as well as obscured quasars missed by optical surveys. SpIES achieves 5σ depths of 6.13 μJy (21.93 AB magnitude) and 5.75 μJy (22.0 AB magnitude) at 3.6 and 4.5 μm, respectively—depths significantly fainter than the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). We show that the SpIES survey recovers a much larger fraction of spectroscopically confirmed quasars (∼98%) in Stripe 82 than are recovered by WISE (∼55%). This depth is especially powerful at high-redshift (z ⩾3.5), where SpIES recovers 94% of confirmed quasars, whereas WISE only recovers 25%. Here we define the SpIES survey parameters and describe the image processing, source extraction, and catalog production methods used to analyze the SpIES data. In addition to this survey paper, we release 234 images created by the SpIES team and three detection catalogs: a 3.6 μm only detection catalog containing ∼6.1 million sources, a 4.5 μm only detection catalog containing ∼6.5 million sources, and a dual-band detection catalog containing ∼5.4 million sources.

• OSTI ID: 22872489
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 225; ISSN 0067-0049; ISSN APJSA2
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
CATALOGS
DETECTION
GALAXY NUCLEI
IMAGE PROCESSING
IMAGES
INFRARED SURVEYS
LUMINOSITY
QUASARS
RED SHIFT
TELESCOPES
WAVELENGTHS