HiZELS, The Emission line survey: FIELDS

http://cosmos.astro.caltech.edu/index.html

COSMOS is an HST Treasury Project to survey a 2 square degree equatorial field with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). It is the largest survey that HST has ever done, utilizing 10% (640 orbits) of its observing time over the course of two years (HST Cycles 12 and 13). The project also incorporates major commitments from other observatories around the world, including the VLA radio telescope, ESO's VLT in Chile, ESA's XMM X-ray satellite, and Japan's 8-meter Subaru telescope in Hawaii. The COSMOS collaboration involves almost 100 scientists in a dozen countries.

http://www.ukidss.org/

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/astronomy/UDS/

UKIDSS is the next generation near-infrared sky survey, the successor to 2MASS. UKIDSS began in May 2005 and will survey 7500 square degrees of the Northern sky, extending over both high and low Galactic latitudes, in JHK to K=18.3. This depth is three magnitudes deeper than 2MASS. UKIDSS will be the true near-infrared counterpart to the Sloan survey, and will produce as well a panoramic clear atlas of the Galactic plane. In fact UKIDSS is made up of five surveys and includes two deep extra-Galactic elements, one covering 35 square degrees to K=21, and the other reaching K=23 over 0.77 square degrees.

The survey instrument is WFCAM on the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii. WFCAM has four 2048x2048 Rockwell devices, at 94% spacing, as illustrated at the top. The pixel scale of 0.4 arcsec gives an exposed solid angle of 0.21 sq. degs.

Four of the principal quarry of UKIDSS are: the coolest and nearest brown dwarfs, high-redshift dusty starburst galaxies, elliptical galaxies and galaxy clusters at redshifts 1‹z‹2, and the highest-redshift quasars, at z=7. UKIDSS aims to discover the nearest object to the Sun (outside the solar system) as well as some of the farthest known objects in the Universe.

The UKIDSS Consortium is a collection of some 100 astronomers who are responsible for the design and execution of the survey. The data become available to the entire ESO community immediately they are entered into the archive. Release to the world follows 18 months after each release to ESO.

The Ultra Deep Survey will provide the most sensitive large-scale map of the distant Universe ever undertaken. The aim is to understand how and when galaxies are formed and directly test our understanding of galaxy formation.

The final image will be 100 times larger than any equivalent survey to date. This is the deepest component of the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) and will take 7 years to complete. Data from the first three years of observation were released in September 2009.

So far over one hundred thousand galaxies have been detected. Press releases and some of the major science results are summarised on this page. Other UDS papers can be found here as they emerge.

BOOTES: http://www.noao.edu/noao/noaodeep/

The NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey (NDWFS) is a deep optical and near-infrared imaging survey that covers two 9.3 square degree fields. It was designed primarily for the study of the existence and evolution of large scale structures at redshifts z>1 as sampled by diverse populations of objects.

The Survey Characteristics (As Originally Proposed):

Field Locations:

The survey covers two regions of sky.

The 1st semester field (we call this the Boötes Field) is a 3x3 degree region near the North Galactic Pole, centered on approximately

RA = 14h 30m 00s, DEC = +34o 30' 00'' (B1950)
RA = 14h 32m 05.7120s, DEC = +34o 16' 47.496'' (J2000)
Galactic Coordinates: l = 57.45, b = 67.28
Ecliptic Coordinates (equinox 2004.00): long = 200.52, lat = 45.99

The 2nd semester field (we call this the Cetus Field) is a 2.3x4.0 degree equatorial strip roughly 30o from the South Galactic Pole, centered on roughly

RA = 2h 07m 29.15s, DEC = -4o 44' 08.24'' (B1950)
RA = 2h 10m 00.00s, DEC = -4o 30' 00.00'' (J2000)
Galactic Coordinates: l = 166.01, b = -60.62
Ecliptic Coordinates (equinox 2004.00): long = 28.75, lat = -16.56

For each of the above fields, the J2000 coordinates are the positions used as the reference positions for the projection of our reduced images.

These fields were selected for their low IRAS cirrus emission, low N(HI), and the eventual public availability of radio data from the VLA FIRST Survey for these fields. The equatorial field has F[100 microns] < 1.5 MJy/sr (over 80% of the area), N(HI) ~ 1.75x1020 cm-2, corresponding to E(B-V) < 0.04. The equatorial field is also only ~15o from the ecliptic, allowing a search for Kuiper belt objects.

A giff format image of the POSS DSS data of the 1st semester (Boötes) field location is shown here.
A giff format image of the POSS DSS data of the 2nd semester (Cetus; equatorial) field location is shown here.

Optical pointing coordinates of subfields in both Deep Wide-Field Survey fields are given here.

Proposed Depth and Sensitivity:

The proposed optical survey depths (see Table) were selected to allow detection of an L* star-forming galaxy at z > 3.5. The IR imaging depths were selected to detect an "unevolved" L* elliptical galaxy at z=1.5, and passively evolving luminous systems to z=2. The planned depth will also permit the study of the Galactic halo stellar populations, the coolest high-latitude white dwarfs to ~1.5kpc, young (bright) field brown dwarfs (like GL229B) to ~75pc, distant supernovae, and distant radio sources.

Documentation of the achieved depths for the Boötes field will be presented in Jannuzi et al. 2005 (in preparation, for the optical imaging) and Dey et al. 2005 (in preparation, for the IR imaging) and off of the link for the October 22, 2004 data release above.