IMPROVED BACKGROUND SUBTRACTION FOR THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY IMAGES

By M. Blanton, E. Kazin, D. Muna, B. Weaver, Adrian M. Price-Whelan. 2011

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We describe a procedure for background subtracting Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) imaging that improves the resulting detection and photometry of large galaxies on the sky. Within each SDSS drift scan run, we mask out detected sources and then fit a smooth function to the variation of the sky background. This procedure has been applied to all SDSS-III Data Release 8 images, and the results are available as part of that data set. We have tested the effect of our background subtraction on the photometry of large galaxies by inserting fake galaxies into the raw pixels, reanalyzing the data, and measuring them after background subtraction. Our technique results in no size-dependent bias in galaxy fluxes up to half-light radii r50 ∼ 100 arcsec; in contrast, for galaxies of that size the standard SDSS photometric catalog underestimates fluxes by about 1.5 mag. Our results represent a substantial improvement over the standard SDSS catalog results and should form the basis of any analysis of nearby galaxies using the SDSS imaging data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e2b08daa8d5c2ff65b082215c6154f594d9ac3e

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Citations in the corpus

THE DATA REDUCTION PIPELINE FOR THE SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU GALAXY SURVEY (2016, methodology): “…wavelengths of the Hβ, [O iii] λ5007, Hα, and [N ii] λ6583 nebular emission lines given the known galaxy redshift from the NASA-Sloan Atlas (NSA; Blanton et al. 2011).52 Although many of the MaNGA galaxies do not have strong emission line features in their central spectra, sufficiently many…”
Illuminating Low Surface Brightness Galaxies with the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “…of LSBGs down to central surface brightnesses of µ0(B) ∼ 24 mag arcsec−2 (e.g., Zhong et al. 2008; Rosenbaum et al. 2009; Galaz et al. 2011), and fainter limits are continuously being reached through advances in observing strategies and data reduction (e.g., Blanton et al. 2011; ar X iv :1 70 9.”
AN ATLAS OF GALAXY SPECTRAL ENERGY DISTRIBUTIONS FROM THE ULTRAVIOLET TO THE MID-INFRARED (2013, methodology): “For comparison, in Figure 4 we also plot the colors and magnitudes of g < 14 galaxies drawn from the NASA-Sloan Atlas (Blanton et al. 2011) .”
DWARF GALAXIES WITH OPTICAL SIGNATURES OF ACTIVE MASSIVE BLACK HOLES (2013, result): “Photometry is improved over the standard SDSS DR8 photometric catalog as described in Blanton et al. (2011) and results in a cleaner sample of dwarf galaxies compared to previous catalogs that include many fragmented pieces of extended massive galaxies.”
THE NATURE OF LINER-LIKE EMISSION IN RED GALAXIES (2011, methodology): “We employed an improved background subtraction technique (Blanton et al. 2011) to treat these nearby large galaxies properly.”
Galactic accretion and the outer structure of galaxies in the CDM model (2013, background): “The pipeline sky subtraction was known to have shortcomings in early data releases, but was revised in DR813 to improve the photometry of extended lowsurface brightness regions around low redshift galaxies (Blanton et al. 2011).”
THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY: THE GALAXY POPULATION DETECTED BY ALFALFA (2012, methodology): “Blanton et al. (2011) have presented a new method for background subtracting the SDSS imaging which they apply to the SDSS-III DR8 images.”
OVERVIEW OF THE SDSS-IV MaNGA SURVEY: MAPPING NEARBY GALAXIES AT APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY (2014, methodology): “The NSA is a catalog of nearby galaxies within 200 Mpc (z = 0.055) based on the SDSS DR7 MAIN galaxy sample (Abazajian et al. 2009), but incorporating data from additional sources and image reprocessing optimized for large galaxies (Blanton et al. 2011).”
Dust Attenuation Curves in the Local Universe: Demographics and New Laws for Star-forming Galaxies and High-redshift Analogs (2018, methodology): “We take UV and optical photometry, as well as redshifts, from NASASloan Atlas (v0_1_2; Blanton et al. 2011), which, by collecting redshifts from a variety of sources (including IPAC NED) has a more complete redshift coverage at z< 0.05 than the SDSS spectroscopic catalog alone.”
The SAGA Survey. I. Satellite Galaxy Populations around Eight Milky Way Analogs (2017, methodology): “…supplement HyperLEDA with data from various sources including the Nearby Galaxy Catalog (Karachentsev et al. 2013), the 2MASS redshift survey and Extended Source Catalogs (Jarrett et al. 2000), the NASA–Sloan Atlas (NSA; Blanton et al. 2011), and the 6dF redshift survey (Jones et al. 2009).”
The SDSS-IV MaNGA Sample: Design, Optimization, and Usage Considerations (2017, methodology): “The SDSS imaging has been reprocessed to be better suited to the analysis of these large nearby galaxies (Blanton et al. 2011).”
THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY COADD: 275 deg2 OF DEEP SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY IMAGING ON STRIPE 82 (2011, methodology): “As the data we used for the coadd came from DR7 and earlier, the improved sky subtraction of the DR8 PHOTO was not implemented (Aihara et al. 2011; see also Blanton et al. 2011 for continued work on this subtle problem).”
THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY: THE α.40 H i SOURCE CATALOG, ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE DERIVATION OF THE H i MASS FUNCTION (2011, background): “Particularly relevant discussions of background subtraction issues are given in West et al. (2010) and Blanton et al. (2011).”
SDSS IV MaNGA – metallicity and nitrogen abundance gradients in local galaxies (2017, methodology): “The MaNGA galaxy target sample is drawn from an extended version of the NASA-Sloan catalogue (NSA v1_0_11, Blanton et al. 2011), and is selected in order to fulfil a number of design criteria motivated by the core science goals of the survey (Yan et al. 2016b).”
(Almost) Dark Galaxies in the ALFALFA Survey: Isolated H i-bearing Ultra-diffuse Galaxies (2017, methodology): “Archival SDSS Data We obtained calibrated, background subtracted SDSS optical images in the g, r, and i bands for the full sample from the SDSS mosaic server described in Blanton et al. (2011).”
PRIMUS: CONSTRAINTS ON STAR FORMATION QUENCHING AND GALAXY MERGING, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR MASS FUNCTION FROM z = 0–1 (2013, methodology): “…the fluxes of galaxies with extended surface brightness profiles such as the spheroidal galaxies that dominate the massive end of the SMF (see also Blanton et al. 2011); and second, Li & White derived stellar masses using the standard set of K-correct basis templates (Blanton & Roweis 2007),…”
BREATHING FIRE: HOW STELLAR FEEDBACK DRIVES RADIAL MIGRATION, RAPID SIZE FLUCTUATIONS, AND POPULATION GRADIENTS IN LOW-MASS GALAXIES (2015, methodology): “We compare the radii measured in our simulations to the effective radii of galaxies observed in the SDSS, as measured in the NASA-Sloan Atlas (NSA; Blanton et al. 2011).”
The Fifteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: First Release of MaNGA-derived Quantities, Data Visualization Tools, and Stellar Library (2018, methodology): “…z that is used as the starting guess by the DAP when analyzing the MaNGA data cubes. z is generally identical to the NASA-Sloan Atlas (NSA) (Blanton et al. 2011) catalog redshift for the majority of MaNGA galaxies, but the origin of the redshift can vary for galaxies in the ∼ 25 MaNGA…”