Site Map
Contacts
Follow us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter YouTube channel
Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto

CALIFA, the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey:
II. First public data release

B. Husemann, K. Jahnke, S. F. Sánchez, D. Barrado y Navascues, S. Bekeraitè, D. J. Bomans, A. Castillo-Morales, C. Catalán-Torrecilla, R. Cid Fernandes, J. Falcón-Barroso, R. García-Benito, R. M. González Delgado, J. Iglésias-Páramo, B. D. Johnson, D. Kupko, R. López-Fernández, M. Lyubenova, R. A. Marino, D. Mast, A. Miskolczi, A. Monreal Ibero, A. Gil de Paz, I. Pérez, F. F. Rosales-Ortega, T. Ruiz-Lara, U. Schilling, G. van de Ven, C. J. Walcher, J. Alves, A. L. de Amorim, N. Backsmann, J. K. Barrera-Ballesteros, J. Bland-Hawthorn, R.-J. Dettmar, M. Demleitner, A. I. Díaz, H. Enke, E. Florido, H. Flores, L. Galbany, A. Gallazzi, B. García-Lorenzo, J. M. Gomes, N. Gruel, T. Haines, L. Holmes, B. Jungwiert, V. Kalinova, C. Kehrig, R. C Kennicutt, J. Klar, M. D. Lehnert, Á. R. López-Sánchez, A. de Lorenzo-Cáceres, E. Mármol-Queraltó, I. Márquez, J. Méndez-Abreu, M. Mollá, A. del Olmo, S. Meidt, P. Papaderos, J. Puschnig, A. Quirrenbach, M. M. Roth, P. Sánchez-Blázquez, K. Spekkens, R. Singh, V. Stanishev, S. C. Trager, J. M. Vílchez, V. Wild, L. Wisotzki, S. Zibetti, B. Ziegler

Abstract
We present the first public data release (DR1) of the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) survey. It consists of sciencegrade optical datacubes for the first 100 of eventually 600 nearby (0:005 < z < 0:03) galaxies, obtained with the integral-field spectrograph PMAS/PPak mounted on the 3.5m telescope at the Calar Alto observatory. The galaxies in DR1 already cover a wide range of properties in color-magnitude space, morphological type, stellar mass, and gas ionization conditions. This offers the potential to tackle a variety of open questions in galaxy evolution using spatially resolved spectroscopy. Two different spectral setups are available for each galaxy, (i) a low-resolution V500 setup covering the nominal wavelength range 3745–7500Å with a spectral resolution of 6.0Å (FWHM), and (ii) a medium-resolution V1200 setup covering the nominal wavelength range 3650–4840Å with a spectral resolution of 2.3Å (FWHM). We present the characteristics and data structure of the CALIFA datasets that should be taken into account for scientific exploitation of the data, in particular the effects of vignetting, bad pixels and spatially correlated noise. The data quality test for all 100 galaxies showed that we reach a median limiting continuum sensitivity of 1.0 ⨯ 10-18 erg s-1 cm-2 Å-1 arcsec-2 at 5635Å and 2:2⨯10-18 erg s-1 cm-2 Å-1 arcsec-2 at 4500Å for the V500 and V1200 setup respectively, which corresponds to limiting r and g band surface brightnesses of 23.6 mag arcsec-2 and 23:4 mag arcsec-2, or an unresolved emission-line flux detection limit of roughly 1 ⨯ 10-17 erg s-1 cm-2 arcsec-2 and 0:6 ⨯ 10-17 erg s-1 cm-2 arcsec-2, respectively. The median spatial resolution is 3".7, and the absolute spectrophotometric calibration is better than 15% (1σ). We also describe the available interfaces and tools that allow easy access to this first public CALIFA data at http://califa.caha.es/DR1.

Keywords
techniques: spectroscopic – Galaxy: general – surveys

Notes
Based on observations collected at the Centro Astronómico Hispano Alemán (CAHA) at Calar Alto, operated jointly by the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (MPIA) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC)

Astronomy and Astrophysics
Volume 549, Page A87_1
January 2013

>> ADS>> DOI

Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences

Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA) is a new but long anticipated research infrastructure with a national dimension. It embodies a bold but feasible vision for the development of Astronomy, Astrophysics and Space Sciences in Portugal, taking full advantage and fully realizing the potential created by the national membership of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO). IA resulted from the merging the two most prominent research units in the field in Portugal: the Centre for Astrophysics of the University of Porto (CAUP) and the Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics of the University of Lisbon (CAAUL). It currently hosts more than two-thirds of all active researchers working in Space Sciences in Portugal, and is responsible for an even greater fraction of the national productivity in international ISI journals in the area of Space Sciences. This is the scientific area with the highest relative impact factor (1.65 times above the international average) and the field with the highest average number of citations per article for Portugal.

Proceed on CAUP's website|Go to IA website