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Extragalactic Astronomy with 2Mass EXTRAGALACTIC ASTRONOMY WITH 2MASS S. E. Schneider M. F. Skrutskie 1, T. J. Chester 2, T. H. Jarrett J. P. Huchra 3 1 Un iversity of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA 2 Infrared Processing and Archive Center, Pasadena, CA, USA 1, 2, 3 Center fo r Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA Abstract The Two-Micron Sky Survey (2MASS) is about to begin surveying the northern sky, and will begin surveying the south in less than a year. Survey data will be released to the community approximately months after the official survey start, and will provide All 18 a wide range of opportunities for extragalactic astronomy in the infrared. The survey properties are described here, along with a few results from the 2MASS prototype camera. 1 Introduction Almost thirty years after the Two Micron Sky Survey [4] . 2MASS is a near-infrared survey of the whole sky that will be more than 10,000 times deeper. The survey is designed to be as sensitive and uniform as possible while completing mapping in about three years. The survey was motivated by many interests, in particular: (1) searches for rare objects like brown dwarfs, extreme late-type stars, and red QSOs; (2) mapping out the structure of the entire Milky Way using red giants; and (3) cataloging galaxies in the near infrared, where the reduction in absorption allows us to find galaxies deep into the zone of avoidance and obtain total galaxy magnitudes nearly free of internal absorption. Obviously. a near-infrared-selected sample of over a million galaxies will allow a wide range of studies of galaxy properties. The survey is being carried out primarily by UMass and IPAC, with assistance from science team members at several other institutions in the United States. The northern telescope is sited at Mount Hopkins, Arizona, and the matched southern telescope will be installed at Cerro Tololo, Chile later this year. The northern telescope has just been installed, and alignments are underway. The three-channel (J, H, Ks) camera is mounted and working, and the survey will begin just as soon as a few engineering tests can be completed. Meanwhile, !PAC is completing 399 POSS 2MASS IRAS 0.43µm 2.17µm 12µm Figure 1: Optical and near- and far-infrared images of the same field in the Galactic plane. The Palomar image is fromthe blue plate, the 2MASS image is in the K,-band, and the IRAS image is from the 12-micron channel. the "pipeline" software for data analysis. and a full end-to-end test of the system will take place shortly after this conference. We plan to provide 2MASS data to the community as soon as we can ensure its reliability, and our goals is to begin releasing the data within 18 months of the official survey start. We expect these data to be a resource analagous to the Palomar Sky Survey, with the advantages that they are digital and that we will also provide detailed source extractions. A comparison of the same fieldas seen on the POSS, by 2MASS, and by IRAS is shown in Figure L Note that while a few sources repeat, the sky at two microns looks quite different than at the shorter and longer wavelengths. In this paper, I will explain the survey methodology, describe the various data products scheduled for release, and characterize the quality of the data with some examples from the 2MASS prototype camera, which was optically almost identical to the final survey camera. 2 The Survey In order to cover the entire sky in a reasonable amount of time. two things are necessary: sensitive detectors and a method for rapid coverage. NICMOS-:3 technology combined with a 1.3 m telescope provides the sensitivity: 2MASS reaches a Ks magnitude of 14.3 (lOu) for point sources in less than 8 seconds of total integration. The 256 x 256 chips also effectively set the resolution of the survey, since the overall timeline for the survey is budgeted for only a few years. As a result, the survey collects data with 2" pixels, which undersamples the point 400 Single Frame 5!6!hst overlap ' 10% Figure 2: The survey technique is to slew the telescope continuously in declination while using a tip-tilt secondary to freeze the image on individualOverlap frames with a 1.3 s integration time. Frames are overlapped by 5/6ths. and neighboring scans are overlapped by 10%. spread function, but by a dithering scheme (described below) subsampling is achieved, which improves the effective resolution. Besides requiring a method for rapid coverage, a major goal of the survey is to produce highly uniform data. As a result, the 2MASS team developed a highly automated system, a camera and telescope with excellent optics, and a large amount of overlap between fields. The camera uses dichroics to split .J, H, and K,, and simply triplicates the optical path of the prototype camera which we ha,·e tested extensively. The telescope is a 1.3 m cassegrain, with accurate position acquisition and well-controlled focus behavior. The camera/telescope com­ bination provides excellent optical characteristics, with nearly diffraction-limited performance, an essentially uniform point spread function across the field in all three bands, and low losses. The survey technique is to collect a series of frames, while the telescope slews continuously in declination. A tip-tilt secondary freezes the image for 1.3 s integrations spaced so that each image overlaps the previous one by 5/6ths. (See Figure 2.) The array is rotated at a slight angle to the scan direction and the step size is slightly adjusted in order to sample each source at six different positions with respect to the pixel grid, providing good sampling of the point spread function. The six overlapping images of each spot on the sky are compared and combined to produce the finalimages. In addition, a brief 50 ms integration is used to measure bright sources and as part of the array reset procedure. 401 The sky is covered by almost 60,000 scans, each 8.5 arcmin wide by 6 deg long in declination. The 272 frames along each scan are used to generate the image fiat. Stars in each scan are tied into the Tycho coordinate system [2], yielding astrometry accurate to better than 0.5 arcsec. Photometric calibration sources are observed approximately every two hours to monitor the zero-point and color corrections. Ultimately, each calibration source will become a calibration field, in which all of the non-Yarying sources can be used to improve the statistical calibration errors. Furthermore, since each scan overlaps its neighbors by about 10%, comparisons of stars in the overlap regions can be used to bridge the astrometry and photometry over the whole sky. At the end of the survey, a global recalibration is planned using these features to improve the survey accuracy and uniformity. 3 The Data The Level-1 Data Specifications for 2MASS are summarized in Table 1. All of these values have been demonstrated or exceeded in the prototype camera runs, and initial tests with the 3-channel survey camera indicate that it may be performing slightly better still. Table - 2MASS Level 1 Specifications Point Sources: 10-a Sensitivity: J<15.8 H<15.1 K<14.3 • 1 • Photometric Accuracy: <5% • Sky Coverage: > 95% • Positional Accuracy: < 0.5" • Reliability: > 99.95% • Completeness: > 99% (lbl > 30°) • Bright source limit: K > 4.0 Galaxies: • Sensitivity: J<l5.0 H<l4.2 K<l3.5 • Photometric Uniformity over sky: < 10% • Photometric Precision: < 10% (for H<l3.8) • Reliability: > 99% (lbl > 20°) > 80% (lbl > 10°) • Completeness: > 90% (lbl > 30°) (for galaxies with scale lengths > 0.5") One of the primary requirements on the survey is to provide photometric uniformity all over the sky to facilitate large scale structure studies. This is a difficult task, but one which we feel makes 2:YIASS especially valuable forextra galactic studies. To ensure this, we have a number of outside additional observing programs to check the results against deeper, higher­ resolution images, to compare fieldswith the northern and southern telescopes, to observe fields in different ways to test for systematics, and to repeat a set of fields many times throughout the lifetime of the survey. If we detect drifts or systematics in the data, we will correct these in the final data release scheduled for approximately two years after the completion of the survey. Tests with the prototype camera (and initial results from the actual survey camera) indicate that we are quite complete down to the quoted K.-band galaxy limit of 13.5. Because we are only barely sensitive at K. to about the 20 mag/arcsec2 level, it is possible that we might miss some low surface brightness objects whose integrated magnitudes exceed our cutoff. Therefore we have developed a second algorithm to pick up low central surface brightness objects. This method works basically by subtracting all detected point and extended sources from images, 402 then performing a series of smoothings on the remainder image to search for extended low surface brightness objects. The second algorithm picks up some additional objects, albeit at some expense to reliability. We are currently "tuning" the parameters of this algorithm to best balance completeness and reliability. The basic data products that will be generated from the survey are described in Table 2. For extragalactic work, the primary database will be the extended source catalog. This will also include non-galaxian extended sources, but it will be dominated by galaxies. One of the main problems in defining this catalog is that there are almost as many ways to measure a galaxy as there are astronomers! We are currently recording magnitudes based on many different photometric schemes.
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