sci19047 — Announcement

Gateway to High-Level Image Products from NOAO Survey Programs

September 18, 2019

Over the last few decades, NOAO has supported large survey programs, i.e., observational investigations requiring large uniform datasets to address important research problems. As a condition of the program, survey teams are required to deliver high-level data products that are made available to the community for archival research. Images and catalogs from the larger, more recent surveys such as DES, DECaLS, and MzLS, are already accessible through our Science Data Archive and our Astro Data Lab.

For many of the older surveys, their raw images are available in the Science Data Archive and their high-level image products accessible through the old NOAO survey archive. To make these products more accessible and improve their documentation, we now provide a simple form of direct access to the high-level reduced images for many of the surveys at:

https://legacy.noirlab.edu/survey-archives/

This link lists the surveys for which imaging data is presently available, roughly organized by general survey type. Each survey appears as a link to a summary page that provides (as available for the given survey):

An overview of the survey.
A link to a mirrored copy of the survey team web pages.
Research papers by the survey teams summarizing the properties of their programs.
Direct FTP access to the data products.
A searchable link to the dataset at the Science Data Archive.

Many of the surveys are well known and have been used heavily. To provide a few examples, the holdings include the classic NOAO Deep Wide Field Survey, a cosmologically-deep “blank sky” survey that has inspired several other follow-on surveysm which are also included in the holdings, such as FLAMEX, the Infrared Bootes Survey, and the z Bootes Survey. Some of the more recent blank-sky surveys include the NEWFIRM Medium-band Survey, and the NEWFIRM Medium-band Survey II. The data store also includes several “pointed” surveys, including programs that survey stellar populations within the Local Group, such as the Outer Limits Survey and the Survey of Local Group Galaxies Currently Forming Stars.

A full list of the surveys, organized by survey type, is provided below. We will continue to update these holdings as more data products become available.

Deep “blank sky” surveys