The Advance Large Homogeneous Area Medium-Band Redshift Astronomical (ALHAMBRA) survey has observed eight different regions of the sky, including sections of the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), DEEP2, European Large-Area Infrared Space Observatory Survey (ELAIS), Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North (GOODS-N), Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and Groth fields using a new photometric system with 20 optical, contiguous ~300{AA} filters plus the JHKs bands. The filter system is designed to optimize the effective photometric redshift depth of the survey, while having enough wavelength resolution for the identification of faint emission lines. The observations, carried out with the Calar Alto 3.5-m telescope using the wide-field optical camera Large Area Imager for Calar Alto (LAICA) and the near-infrared (NIR) instrument Omega-2000, represent a total of ~700h of on-target science images. Here we present multicolour point-spread function (PSF) corrected photometry and photometric redshifts for ~438000 galaxies, detected in synthetic F814W images. The catalogues are complete down to a magnitude I~24.5AB and cover an effective area of 2.79deg^2^. Photometric zero-points were calibrated using stellar transformation equations and refined internally, using a new technique based on the highly robust photometric redshifts measured for emission-line galaxies. We calculate Bayesian photometric redshifts with the Bayesian Photometric Redshift (bpz)2.0 code, obtaining a precision of {delta}z/(1+z_s_)=1 per cent for I<22.5 and {delta}z/(1+z_s_)=1.4 per cent for 22.5<I<24.5. The global n(z) distribution shows a mean redshift <z>=0.56 for I<22.5AB and <z>=0.86 for I<24.5AB. Given its depth and small cosmic variance, ALHAMBRA is a unique data set for galaxy evolution studies.
Advanced Large Homogeneous Area Medium Band Redshift Astronomical (ALHAMBRA) is photometric survey designed to trace the cosmic evolution and cosmic variance. It covers a large area of ~4deg^2^ in eight fields, where seven fields overlap with other surveys, allowing us to have complementary data in other wavelengths. All observations were carried out in 20 continuous, medium band (30nm width) optical and 3 near-infrared (JHK) bands, providing the precise measurements of photometric redshifts. In addition, morphological classification of galaxies is crucial for any kind of galaxy formation and cosmic evolution studies, providing the information about star formation histories, their environment and interactions, internal perturbations, etc. We present a morphological classification of >40000 galaxies in the ALHAMBRA survey. We associate to every galaxy a probability to be early type using the automated Bayesian code galsvm. Despite of the spatial resolution of the ALHAMBRA images (~1arcsec), for 22051 galaxies, we obtained the contamination by other type of less than 10 percent. Of those, 1640 and 10322 galaxies are classified as early- (down to redshifts ~0.5) and late-type (down to redshifts ~1.0), respectively, with magnitudes F_613W_<=22.0. In addition, for magnitude range 22.0<F_613W_<=23.0, we classified other 10089 late-type galaxies with redshifts <=1.3. We show that the classified objects populate the expected regions in the colour-mass and colour-magnitude planes. The presented data set is especially attractive given the homogeneous multiwavelength coverage available in the ALHAMBRA fields, and is intended to be used in a variety of scientific applications. The low-contamination catalogue (<10 percent) is made publicly available with this paper.
We have used the very large Jodrell Bank VLA Astrometric Survey/Cosmic Lens All-Sky Survey 8.4-GHz surveys of flat-spectrum radio sources to test the hypothesis that there is a systematic alignment of polarization position angle vectors on cosmological scales of the type claimed by Hutsemekers et al. (2005, Cat. <J/A+A/441/915>). The polarization position angles of 4290 sources with polarized flux density 1mJy have been examined. They do not reveal large-scale alignments either as a whole or when split in half into high-redshift (z>=1.24) and low-redshift subsamples. Nor do the radio sources which lie in the specific areas covered by Hutsemekers et al. (<J/A+A/441/915>) show any significant effect. We have also looked at the position angles of parsec-scale jets derived from very long baseline interferometry observations and again find no evidence for systematic alignments. Finally, we have investigated the correlation between the polarization position angle and those of the parsec-scale jets. As expected, we find that there is a tendency for the polarization angles to be perpendicular to the jet angles. However, the difference in jet and polarization position angles does not show any systematic trend in different parts of the sky.
Results of the first two years of observations using the All Sky Automated Survey prototype camera are presented. More than 140000 stars in 50 Selected Fields covering 300 square degrees were monitored each clear night in the I-band resulting in the ASAS Photometric I-band Catalog containing over 5*10^7^ individual measurements. Nightly monitoring of over 100 standard stars confirms that most of our data remains within {sigma}_I_=0.03mag of the standard I system. Search for the stars varying on the time scales longer than a day revealed about 3800 variable stars (mostly irregular, pulsating and binaries) brighter than 13mag. Only 630 of them are known or suspected variables included in the GCVS (Kholopov 1985, Cat. <II/214>). Among the stars brighter than I~7.5 (which are saturated on our frames) we have found about 50 variables (12 are in the GCVS, 6 others in the Hipparcos catalog (Cat. <I/239>). Because of the large volume of data we present here only selected tables and light curves, but the complete ASAS Catalog of Variable Stars (currently divided into Periodic and Miscellaneous sections) and all photometric data are available on the Internet http://www.astrouw.edu.pl/~gp/asas/asas.html or http://archive.princeton.edu/~asas/
Results of the first two months of observations using the All Sky Survey prototype camera are presented. More than 45000 stars in 24 Selected Fields covering 140 square degrees were monitored a few times per night resulting in the I-band catalog containing 10^7^ individual measurements. Period search revealed 126 variable stars brighter than 13mag with periods less than 20d. Only 30 of them are known variable stars included in the General Catalogue of Variable Stars (<II/214>). The other 90 objects are newly detected variable stars - mainly eclipsing binaries (75%) and pulsating stars (17%). We estimate that completeness of the current catalogs of variable stars is smaller than 50% already for the stars brighter than 9mag. The catalog is accessible over the WWW: http://www.astrouw.edu.pl/~gp/asas/asas.html
We present an all-sky catalog of M dwarf stars with apparent infrared magnitude J<10. The 8889 stars are selected from the ongoing SUPERBLINK survey of stars with proper motion pm>40mas/yr, supplemented on the bright end with the Tycho-2 catalog.
Most future surveys designed to discover transiting exoplanets, including TESS and PLATO, will target bright (V<13) and nearby solar-type stars having a spectral type later than F5. In order to enhance the probability of identifying transits, these surveys must cover a very large area on the sky, because of the intrinsically low areal density of bright targets. Unfortunately, no existing catalog of stellar parameters is both deep and wide enough to provide a homogeneous input list. As the first Gaia data release exploitable for this purpose is expected to be released not earlier than late 2017, we have devised an improved reduced-proper-motion method to discriminate late field dwarfs and giants by combining UCAC4 proper motions with APASS DR6 photometry, and relying on RAVEDR4 as an external calibrator. The output, named UCAC4-RPM, is a publicly-available, complete all-sky catalog of solar-type dwarfs down to V<13.5, plus an extension to logg>3.0 subgiants. The relatively low amount of contamination (defined as the fraction of false positives; <30%) also makes UCAC4-RPM a useful tool for the past and ongoing ground-based transit surveys, which need to discard candidate signals originating from early-type or giant stars. As an application, we show how UCAC4-RPM may support the preparation of the TESS (that will map almost the entire sky) input catalog and the input catalog of PLATO, planned to survey more than half of the whole sky with exquisite photometric precision.
ARCHES (Astronomical Resource Cross-matching for High Energy Studies) is a FP7-Space funded project whose aim is to provide the astronomical community with well-characterised multi-wavelength data in the form of spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for large samples of objects extracted from the 3XMM DR5 X-ray catalogue of serendipitous sources. The project has developed new tools implementing fully probabilistic simultaneous cross-correlation of several catalogues for unresolved sources. A cleaned and enhanced version of the 3XMM DR5 catalogue (the 3XMMe catalogue) has been cross-correlated using the ARCHES tool with a number of selected multi-wavelength archival catalogues. These catalogues cover wavelengths ranging from UV to far IR. They provide probabilities of associations, magnitude and fluxes from which spectral energy distributions can be extracted.
We present fitted UBVRI-ZY and u'g'r'i'z' magnitudes, spectral types, and distances for 2.4 million stars, derived from synthetic photometry of a library spectrum that best matches the Tycho2 BTVT, NOMAD RN, and 2MASS JHK2/S catalog magnitudes. We present similarly synthesized multifilter magnitudes, types, and distances for 4.8 million stars with 2MASS and SDSS photometry to g<16 within the Sloan survey region, for Landolt and Sloan primary standards, and for Sloan northern (photometric telescope) and southern secondary standards.