Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys

By A. Dey, David Schlegel, Dustin Lang, R. Blum, K. Burleigh, Xiaohui Fan, J. Findlay, Douglas P. Finkbeiner, D. Herrera, S. Juneau and 148 more. Astronomical Journal, 2018

1,212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys (http://legacysurvey.org/) are a combination of three public projects (the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey, the Beijing–Arizona Sky Survey, and the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey) that will jointly image ≈14,000 deg2 of the extragalactic sky visible from the northern hemisphere in three optical bands (g, r, and z) using telescopes at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The combined survey footprint is split into two contiguous areas by the Galactic plane. The optical imaging is conducted using a unique strategy of dynamically adjusting the exposure times and pointing selection during observing that results in a survey of nearly uniform depth. In addition to calibrated images, the project is delivering a catalog, constructed by using a probabilistic inference-based approach to estimate source shapes and brightnesses. The catalog includes photometry from the grz optical bands and from four mid-infrared bands (at 3.4, 4.6, 12, and 22 μm) observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite during its full operational lifetime. The project plans two public data releases each year. All the software used to generate the catalogs is also released with the data. This paper provides an overview of the Legacy Surveys project.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS). Science Case and Survey Design (2019, background): “…2018), HyperSuprimeCam (HSC; ∗ Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow Aihara et al. 2018), the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) and related surveys (Dey et al. 2019), the Dark Energy Survey (DES; Abbott et al. 2018) and the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS;…”
Milky Way Satellite Census. I. The Observational Selection Function for Milky Way Satellites in DES Y3 and Pan-STARRS DR1 (2019, background): “Programs like MagLiteS (Drlica-Wagner et al. 2016; Torrealba et al. 2018), BLISS (Mau et al. 2019), DECaLS (Dey et al. 2019), and DELVE (Mau et al. 2020)16 are actively collecting, processing, and mining these data for fainter and more distant satellites.”
The total mass of the Large Magellanic Cloud from its perturbation on the Orphan stream (2018, methodology): “…that for a sub-section of the stream, Koposov et al. (2019) also presented two additional debris track measurements, one based on red giant branch (RGB) stars from Gaia DR2 and one computed using the RGB/main-sequence turn-off stars in Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS, Dey et al. 2018).”
Target Selection and Validation of DESI Emission Line Galaxies (2022, methodology): “…southern part of the NGC and the South Galactic Cap (SGC), the imaging mostly comes from two programs: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS; Dey et al. 2019) and DES (The Dark Energy Survey Collaboration 2005) —both use the Dark Energy Camera (Flaugher et al. 2015) on the 4 m Blanco…”
Data Release 1 of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (2025, positive): “…targets using 14,000 deg 2 of broadband optical and mid-infrared photometry from DR9 of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys ( H. Zou et al. 2017; A. Dey et al. 2019; J. Moustakas et al. 2023; A. D. Myers et al. 2023a; hereafter, the Legacy Surveys ) , and, in some cases, using Gaia stellar…”
COSMOS2020: A Panchromatic View of the Universe to z ∼ 10 from Two Complementary Catalogs (2021, methodology): “The Tractor has already been applied to several deep imaging surveys (Nyland et al. 2017; Dey et al. 2019), the methods of which have greatly influenced this work.”
Survey Operations for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (2023, methodology): “No Legacy Survey imaging was available in the SGC north of δ = 32◦, though this region would otherwise be favorable for extragalactic studies.”
Validation of the Scientific Program for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (2023, methodology): “The full processing for all imaging data follows an approach similar to that in Dey et al. (2019), with several improvements in data reduction algorithms.”
Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological implications from two decades of spectroscopic surveys at the Apache Point Observatory (2020, methodology): “…tracers (du Mas des Bourboux et al. 2019), between the C IV forest and quasars at z > 2 (Blomqvist et al. 2019), and finally, in the cross-correlation between spectroscopic quasars and high redshift galaxies (Zarrouk et al. 2020) selected from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys (Dey et al. 2019).”
Pōniuā‘ena: A Luminous z = 7.5 Quasar Hosting a 1.5 Billion Solar Mass Black Hole (2020, methodology): “J1007+2115 was selected in the area covered by the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys (DECaLS, Dey et al. 2019), the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1, Chambers et al. 2016) survey, the UKIRT Hemisphere Survey (UHS, Dye et al. 2018), and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer survey (WISE, Wright et al. 2010).”
TDCOSMO IV: Hierarchical time-delay cosmography -- joint inference of the Hubble constant and galaxy density profiles (2020, methodology): “We use the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys (DLS; Dey et al. 2019) to characterize the environment of the SLACS lenses.”