1112.0312 (Michael C. Cooper et al.)

The Arizona CDFS Environment Survey (ACES): A Magellan/IMACS Spectroscopic Survey of the Chandra Deep Field South    [PDF]

Michael C. Cooper, R. Yan, M. Dickinson, S. Juneau, J. M. Lotz, J. A. Newman, C. Papovich, S. Salim, G. Walth, B. J. Weiner, C. N. A. Willmer

We present the Arizona CDFS Environment Survey (ACES), a recently-completed spectroscopic redshift survey of the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS) conducted using IMACS on the Magellan-Baade telescope. In total, the survey targeted 7277 unique sources down to a limiting magnitude of R = 24.1, yielding 5080 secure redshifts across the ~30' x 30' extended CDFS region. The ACES dataset delivers a significant increase to both the spatial coverage and the sampling density of the spectroscopic observations in the field. Combined with previously-published, spectroscopic redshifts, ACES now creates a highly-complete survey of the galaxy population at R < 23, enabling the local galaxy density (or environment) on relatively small scales (~1 Mpc) to be measured at z < 1 in one of the most heavily-studied and data-rich fields in the sky. Here, we describe the motivation, design, and implementation of the survey and present a preliminary redshift and environment catalog. In addition, we utilize the ACES spectroscopic redshift catalog to assess the quality of photometric redshifts from both the COMBO-17 and MUSYC imaging surveys of the CDFS.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.0312