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Skymapper Southern Survey: First Data Release (DR1) Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA) doi: 10.1017/pas.2018.xxx. SkyMapper Southern Survey: First Data Release (DR1) Christian Wolf1,2, Christopher A. Onken1,2, Lance C. Luvaul1, Brian P. Schmidt1,2, Michael S. Bessell1, Seo-Won Chang1,2, Gary S. Da Costa1, Dougal Mackey1, Tony Martin-Jones1, Simon J. Murphy1,3, Tim Preston1,4, Richard A. Scalzo1,2,5, Li Shao1,6, Jon Smillie7, Patrick Tisserand1,8, Marc C. White1 and Fang Yuan1,2,9 1Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2611, Australia 2ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) 3Present address: School of Physical, Environmental and Mathematical Sciences, University of New South Wales Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia 4Present address: Carolus Software Ltd., 244 5th Avenue, New York, NY, 10001, USA 5Present address: Centre for Translational Data Science, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia 6Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100871, P. R. China 7National Computational Infrastructure, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia 8Present address: Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 6 et CNRS, Institut d‘Astrophysique de Paris, 98 bis bd Arago, F-75014 Paris, France 9Present address: Geoscience Australia, GPO Box 378, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia Abstract We present the first data release (DR1) of the SkyMapper Southern Survey, a hemispheric survey carried out with the SkyMapper Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. Here, we present the survey strategy, data processing, catalogue construction and database schema. The DR1 dataset includes over 66,000 images from the Shallow Survey component, covering an area of 17,200 deg2 in all six SkyMapper passbands uvgriz, while the full area covered by any passband exceeds 20,000 deg2. The catalogues contain over 285 million unique astrophysical objects, complete to roughly 18 mag in all bands. We compare our griz point-source photometry with PanSTARRS1 DR1 and note an RMS scatter of 2%. The internal reproducibility of SkyMapper photometry is on the order of 1%. Astrometric precision is better than 0.2 arcsec based on comparison with Gaia DR1. We describe the end-user database, through which data are presented to the world community, and provide some illustrative science queries. Keywords: surveys – catalogs – methods: observational – telescopes 1 INTRODUCTION SDSS, e.g., imaged ∼70% of the Northern hemisphere sky. In contrast, the SkyMapper Southern Survey pre- Maps of the sky have been produced throughout the cul- sented here covers the entire Southern hemisphere. Many tural history of mankind. They represented the patterns surveys carried out from space-based telescopes aim for arXiv:1801.07834v1 [astro-ph.IM] 24 Jan 2018 in the sky, long believed to be static, for navigation and all-sky coverage, e.g. the Gaia survey (Gaia Collabora- time-keeping; they provided a reference for measuring tion et al., 2016a,b), the survey by the Widefield Infrared motions and allowed the identification of transient ob- Survey Explorer (WISE; Wright et al., 2010), the X-ray jects. Over time we came to understand our place in the surveys from the Roentgen Satellite (ROSAT; Voges Milky Way and the Universe at large, and discovered et al., 1999) and the eROSITA mission (Merloni et al., new phenomena such as novae and supernovae. From 2012). These missions do not replace but complement motions of celestial bodies we inferred the form and each other by observing the sky at different wavelengths, parameters of fundamental laws in physics such as the which allows us to see different physical components of law of gravity and derived the existence of dark matter. the matter in the Universe; or they have different spe- In modern times, digital surveys such as the Sloan cialities such as Gaia’s high-precision astrometry, and Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; York et al., 2000) have revo- they observe the sky at different times thus revealing lutionised the speed and ease of making new discoveries. variable phenomena at different stages. Instrumental limitations imply that surveys need to strike a balance between depth and areal coverage. The Currently, a complete multi-colour inventory of the 1 2 Wolf et al. Southern sky to a depth of g, r ≈ 22, similar to the et al., 2013) observing low radio frequencies, as well SDSS in the Northern sky, is missing, and one aim of the as the future Square Kilometre Array (SKA; Carilli SkyMapper project is to fill this gap. However, SkyMap- & Rawlings, 2004). ASKAP and MWA are creat- per is not a Southern copy of the SDSS in the North, ing deep maps of the radio sky across more than in the way in which e.g. the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey the Southern hemisphere, and providing them with (2MASS; Skrutskie et al., 2006) used two telescopes in a homogeneous optical reference atlas is a major two hemispheres to create a consistent all-sky dataset mission for SkyMapper. from the ground. The SDSS in the North was especially 5. More generally, cosmic dipoles have fundamental successful in revealing new knowledge about distant importance for understanding our place and mo- galaxies, which should appear similar in the South given tion within the Universe, and they may reveal new we live in an approximately isotropic Universe. Instead, physics beyond the Standard Model. Without an all- SkyMapper aims for new discovery space beyond just sky view, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE; repeating the SDSS in another hemisphere: Lineweaver et al., 1996) would have had a hard time measuring the motion of our Milky Way relative to 1. One focus of SkyMapper is studying the stars in the microwave background, which is a frame of ref- our Milky Way, where the hemispheres are very erence on a scale large enough to not be dominated different from each other. The Southern sky includes by its own peculiarities. Without an all-sky dataset, the bulge and centre of our Milky Way, as well as Blake & Wall(2002) would not have corroborated our two largest satellite galaxies, the Magellanic this cosmic dipole by referring to distant radio galax- Clouds. Currently, we expect that the oldest stars ies. Current debates concern e.g. a cosmic dipole in in the Milky Way will be found in the bulge, and the fine-structure constant of electrodynamics (e.g. SkyMapper has indeed found the oldest currently Webb et al., 2001; Murphy et al., 2016), and this known examples there (Howes et al., 2015). work would greatly benefit from samples of quasi- 2. The SkyMapper filters differ from SDSS filters stellar objects (QSOs) that cover most of the sky mainly in splitting the SDSS u-band into two fil- from pole to pole. SkyMapper will provide critical ters: while the SDSS filter has (λcen/FWHM) = coverage of the Southern hemisphere to advance (358nm/55nm), SkyMapper has a violet v-band such studies. (384/28) and a more ultraviolet u-band (349/42). This choice of filters adds direct photometric sensi- In the SDSS, spectroscopy was an integral part of the tivity to the surface gravity of stars via the strength project, carried out at the same facility when the seeing of the Hydrogen Balmer break driving changes in was better matched to the task of feeding large fibres the u − v colour, as well as to their metallicity via than to taking sharp images of the sky. From the start, metal lines affecting the v − g colour. By exploiting SDSS planned to take a million spectra of bright galaxies this information, SkyMapper has found the most as well as other objects of special interest, and over chemically pristine star currently known (Keller et time the facility has been extended to allow dedicated al., 2014). We note that the other filters, griz, differ spectroscopic surveys for several hundreds of thousands from their SDSS cousins in central wavelength and of stars, as well as over a million luminous red galaxies width by up to 40 nm (see Table1, and Fig. 17 for (LRGs) and nearly 300,000 QSOs (Alam et al., 2015; colour terms). Blanton et al., 2017). 3. Southern galaxies are of special interest when their SkyMapper, in contrast, was planned from the start distances are below e.g. 500 Mpc, as the distinct as a pure imaging project, with periods of poor seeing large-scale structure creates environments that dif- dedicated to a transient survey (Scalzo et al., 2017) that fer from the ones in the North. While the Northern finds supernovae by repeatedly imaging part of the sky, hemisphere has the iconic Virgo and Coma galaxy while using the main Southern Survey as a reference. clusters, as well as the CfA2 and SDSS Great Walls Spectroscopy of a large number of objects was always (Geller & Huchra, 1989; Gott et al., 2005), the South going to be possible using the AAOmega spectrograph distinguishes itself with the Shapley supercluster at the fibre-fed 2-degree Field facility (Sharp et al., 2006) and the Southern extension to the Virgo Cluster. at the 3.9-m Anglo-Australian Telescope, which can take 4. As no ground-based telescope can observe the en- spectra of nearly 400 objects simultaneously. Also, the tire sky across two hemispheres, the synergy of detailed photometry of SkyMapper provides great power combining data from different telescopes is lim- to preselect rare objects of interest, such as extremely ited by their location. Several cutting-edge wide- metal-poor stars, and helps to minimise the number of field radio telescopes are now being built in the spectra that might otherwise be required. Southern hemisphere, including the Australian SKA However, Australian expertise in multi-fibre instru- Pathfinder (ASKAP; Johnston et al., 2007, 2008) mentation has now led to a new instrument for multi- and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA; Tingay object spectroscopy that greatly reduces the cost per SkyMapper Southern Survey DR1 3 spectrum in massive spectroscopic surveys.
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