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Deep drilling in the time domain with DECam: Survey characterization
Graham, Melissa
Knop, Robert
Kennedy, Thomas
Nugent, Peter E
Bellm, Eric
Catelan, Márcio
Patel, Avi
Smotherman, Hayden
Soraisam, Monika
Stetzler, Steven
Aldoroty, Lauren
Awbrey, Autumn
Baeza-Villagra, Karina
Bernardinelli, Pedro
Bianco, Federica
Brout, Dillon
Clarke, Riley
Clarkson, William
Collett, Thomas
Davenport, James
Fu, Shenming
Gizis, John E
Heinze, Ari
Hu, Lei
Jha, Saurabh W
Jurić, Mario
Kalmbach, Bryce
Kim, Alex
Lee, Chien-Hsiu
Lidman, Chris
Magee, Mark
Martínez-Vázquez, Clara
Matheson, Thomas
Narayan, Gautham
Palmese, Antonella
Phillips, Christopher
Rest, Armin
Rodríguez-Segovia, Nicolás
Street, Rachel
Vivas, Katherina
Wang, Lifan
Wolf, Nicholas
Yang, Jiawen
Oxford University Press
2023
This paper presents a new optical imaging survey of four deep drilling fields (DDFs), two Galactic and two extragalactic, with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4-m Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). During the first year of observations in 2021, >4000 images covering 21 deg2 (seven DECam pointings), with ∼40 epochs (nights) per field and 5 to 6 images per night per filter in g, r, i, and/or z have become publicly available (the proprietary period for this program is waived). We describe the real-time difference-image pipeline and how alerts are distributed to brokers via the same distribution system as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). In this paper, we focus on the two extragalactic deep fields (COSMOS and ELAIS-S1) characterizing the detected sources, and demonstrating that the survey design is effective for probing the discovery space of faint and fast variable and transient sources. We describe and make publicly available 4413 calibrated light curves based on difference-image detection photometry of transients and variables in the extragalactic fields. We also present preliminary scientific analysis regarding the Solar system small bodies, stellar flares and variables, Galactic anomaly detection, fast-rising transients and variables, supernovae, and active Galactic nuclei.
Observational
Image processing
surveys