The First Public Release of South Pole Telescope Data: Maps of a 95 deg^2 Field from 2008 Observations

• Published in: The Astrophysical Journal
• Main Authors: Schaeffer, K. K., Lueker, M., Padin, S., Staniszewski, Z., Vieira, J. D.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Astronomical Society 2011
• Subjects: cosmic background radiation; cosmology: observations; methods: data analysis; surveys; Austral; Canada; Kavli; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/743/1/90

The South Pole Telescope (SPT) has nearly completed a 2500 deg^2 survey of the southern sky in three frequency bands. Here, we present the first public release of SPT maps and associated data products. We present arcminute-resolution maps at 150 GHz and 220 GHz of an approximately 95 deg^2 field centered at R.A. 82°.7, decl. –55°. The field was observed to a depth of approximately 17 μK arcmin at 150 GHz and 41 μK arcmin at 220 GHz during the 2008 austral winter season. Two variations on map filtering and map projection are presented, one tailored for producing catalogs of galaxy clusters detected through their Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect signature and one tailored for producing catalogs of emissive sources. We describe the data processing pipeline, and we present instrument response functions, filter transfer functions, and map noise properties. All data products described in this paper are available for download at http://pole.uchicago.edu/public/data/maps/ra5h30dec-55 and from the NASA Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis server. This is the first step in the eventual release of data from the full 2500 deg^2 SPT survey. © 2011 American Astronomical Society. Received 2011 July 28; accepted 2011 October 24; published 2011 November 23. The South Pole Telescope is supported by the National Science Foundation through grants ANT-0638937 and ANT-0130612. Partial support is also provided by the NSF Physics Frontier Center grant PHY-0114422 to the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Kavli Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The McGill group acknowledges funding from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canada Research Chairs program, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Partial support at Harvard is provided by NSF grants AST-1009012, AST-1009649, and MRI-0723073. B.A.B. is supported by a KICP Fellowship. M.D. and N.H. acknowledge support from Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowships. R.K. ...