The VLT Survey Telescope ATLAS

By T. Shanks, N. Metcalfe, B. Chehade, J. Findlay, M. Irwin, E. González-Solares, J. Lewis, A. Yoldas, R.G.Mann, M. Read and 8 more. 2015

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The VLT Survey Telescope ATLAS survey is an optical ugriz survey aiming to cover ≈4700 deg^2 of the southern sky to similar depths as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). From reduced images and object catalogues provided by the Cambridge Astronomical Surveys Unit, we first find that the median seeing ranges from 0.8 arcsec FWHM (full width at half-maximum) in i to 1.0 arcsec in u, significantly better than the 1.2–1.5 arcsec seeing for SDSS. The 5σ mag limit for stellar sources is r_AB = 22.7 and in all bands these limits are at least as faint as SDSS. SDSS and ATLAS are more equivalent for galaxy photometry except in the z band where ATLAS has significantly higher throughput. We have improved the original ESO magnitude zero-points by comparing m < 16 star magnitudes with the AAVSO Photometric All-Sky Survey in gri, also extrapolating into u and z, resulting in zero-points accurate to ≈ ± 0.02 mag. We finally compare star and galaxy number counts in a 250 deg^2 area with SDSS and other count data and find good agreement. ATLAS data products can be retrieved from the ESO Science Archive, while support for survey science analyses is provided by the OmegaCAM Science Archive, operated by the Wide-Field Astronomy Unit in Edinburgh.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8751853761036025ca6bcdf860c3bc401fcc3cbc

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Citations in the corpus

Gravitational lensing analysis of the Kilo-Degree Survey (2015, methodology): “A more sophisticated procedure, taking into account overlaps from adjacent pointing as well as data from the overlapping ATLAS survey (Shanks et al. 2015), will be included in the future and should constrain the astrometric solution further near the edges of each tile.”
The feeble giant. Discovery of a large and diffuse Milky Way dwarf galaxy in the constellation of Crater (2016, background): “ATLAS (Shanks et al. 2015) is one of the three public ESO surveys currently being carried out by the a 2.6m VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at the Paranal observatory.”
The number and size of subhalo-induced gaps in stellar streams (2016, background): “This is because the haul of cold stellar streams (the prime contender to carry marks of an interaction with lowmass DM subhalos) has risen to at least a dozen structures (Grillmair & Carlin 2016) thanks to high-quality data from all-sky imaging surveys like SDSS (see e.g. Ahn et al. 2012), VST ATLAS”
Active galactic nuclei: what’s in a name? (2017, background): “5) and optical (Shanks et al. 2015, Fig.”
KiDS-450: cosmological parameter constraints from tomographic weak gravitational lensing (2016, background): “However, the area of these patches is covered by the public VST ATLAS Survey (Shanks et al. 2015).”