The Spitzer South Pole Telescope Deep Field: Survey Design and Infrared Array Camera Catalogs

• Main Authors: Ashby, M. L. N., Stanford, S. A., Brodwin, M., Gonzalez, A. H., Martinez-Manso, J., Bartlett, J. G., Benson, B. A., Bleem, L. E., Crawford, T. M., Dey, A., Dressler, A., Einsenhardt, P. R. M., Galametz, A., Jannuzi, B. T., Marrone, D. P., Mei, S., Muzzin, A., Pacaud, F., Pierre, M., Stern, D., Vieira, J. D.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Astronomical Society 2013
• Subjects: catalogs; galaxies: clusters: general; infrared: galaxies; surveys; South Pole; Milky Way; South pole
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1088/0067-0049/209/2/22

The Spitzer South Pole Telescope Deep Field (SSDF) is a wide-area survey using Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) to cover 94 deg^2 of extragalactic sky, making it the largest IRAC survey completed to date outside the Milky Way midplane. The SSDF is centered at (α, δ) = (23:30, –55:00), in a region that combines observations spanning a broad wavelength range from numerous facilities. These include millimeter imaging from the South Pole Telescope, far-infrared observations from Herschel/SPIRE, X-ray observations from the XMM XXL survey, near-infrared observations from the VISTA Hemisphere Survey, and radio-wavelength imaging from the Australia Telescope Compact Array, in a panchromatic project designed to address major outstanding questions surrounding galaxy clusters and the baryon budget. Here we describe the Spitzer/IRAC observations of the SSDF, including the survey design, observations, processing, source extraction, and publicly available data products. In particular, we present two band-merged catalogs, one for each of the two warm IRAC selection bands. They contain roughly 5.5 and 3.7 million distinct sources, the vast majority of which are galaxies, down to the SSDF 5σ sensitivity limits of 19.0 and 18.2 Vega mag (7.0 and 9.4 μJy) at 3.6 and 4.5 μm, respectively. © 2013 American Astronomical Society. Received 2013 July 12; accepted 2013 October 8; published 2013 November 13. This work is based on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Support was provided by NASA through contract number 1439357 issued by JPL/Caltech. IRAF is distributed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is operated by Lawrence Livermore National ...