New York University Value-Added Galaxy Catalog: A Galaxy Catalog Based on New Public Surveys

By M. Blanton, David Schlegel, M. Strauss, J. Brinkmann, Douglas P. Finkbeiner, M. Fukugita, James E. Gunn, David W. Hogg, Željko Ivezic´, G. Knapp and 5 more. 2004

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Here we present the New York University Value-Added Galaxy Catalog (NYU-VAGC), a catalog of local galaxies (mostly below z ≈ 0.3) based on a set of publicly released surveys matched to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 2. The photometric catalog consists of 693,319 galaxies, QSOs, and stars; 343,568 of these have redshift determinations, mostly from the SDSS. Excluding areas masked by bright stars, the photometric sample covers 3514 deg2, and the spectroscopic sample covers 2627 deg2 (with about 85% completeness). Earlier, proprietary versions of this catalog have formed the basis of many SDSS investigations of the power spectrum, correlation function, and luminosity function of galaxies. Future releases will follow future public releases of the SDSS. The catalog includes matches to the Two Micron All Sky Survey Point Source Catalog and Extended Source Catalog, the IRAS Point Source Catalog Redshift Survey, the Two-Degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey, the Third Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies, and the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty cm survey. We calculate and compile derived quantities from the images and spectra of the galaxies in the catalogs (for example, K-corrections and structural parameters for the galaxies). The SDSS catalog presented here is photometrically calibrated in a more consistent way than that distributed by the SDSS Data Release 2 Archive Servers and is thus more appropriate for large-scale structure statistics, reducing systematic calibration errors across the sky from ∼2% to ∼1%. We include an explicit description of the geometry of the catalog, including all imaging and targeting information as a function of sky position. Finally, we have performed eyeball quality checks on a large number of objects in the catalog in order to flag errors (such as errors in deblending). This catalog is complementary to the SDSS Archive Servers in that NYU-VAGC's calibration, geometric description, and conveniently small size are specifically designed for studying galaxy properties and large-scale structure statistics using the SDSS spectroscopic catalog.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

CALIFA, the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey - III. Second public data release (2012, result): “3, we show the r band luminosity function (LF) of the DR1 sample as compared to the mother sample and the reference SDSS sample of Blanton et al. (2005).”
Modelling the anisotropic two-point galaxy correlation function on small scales and single-probe measurements of H(z), DA(z) and f(z)σ8(z) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR7 luminous red galaxies (2012, methodology): “The NYU-VAGC provides the description of the geometry and completeness of the survey in terms of spherical polygons.”
Impact of baryon physics on dark matter structures: a detailed simulation study of halo density profiles (2010, background): “…include a result on Galaxy scales at z = from Conroy et al. (2007) who determined stellar masses from the spectroscopic SDSS value-added catalogue (Blanton et al. 2005), along with halo mass estimates utilising the measured velocity dispersions of the satellites (we have scaled their halo mass,…”
The green valley is a red herring: Galaxy Zoo reveals two evolutionary pathways towards quenching of star formation in early-and late-type galaxies (2014, methodology): “We adopt K-corrections to z = 0.0 from the New York University Value-Added Galaxy Catalog (NYU-VAGC; Blanton et al. 2005; Blanton & Roweis 2007; Padmanabhan et al. 2008).”
The alignment between the distribution of satellites and the orientation of their central galaxy (2006, methodology): “This catalogue was constructed from the New York University Value-Added Galaxy Catalogue (NYU-VAGC; Blanton et al. 2005) 2 using the halobased group finder developed by Yang et al. (2005a, hereafter YMBJ).”
On the Origin of [O II] Emission in Red-Sequence and Poststarburst Galaxies (2005, methodology): “…data used here have been reduced through the Princeton spectroscopic reduction pipeline (D. Schlegel et al. 2006, in preparation), which produces the flux- and wavelengthcalibrated spectra.6 The redshift catalog of galaxies used is from the NYUValue Added Galaxy Catalog7 (Blanton et al. 2005b).”
The Shape of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5 Galaxy Power Spectrum (2007, methodology): “…by comparing recovered power spectra from samples of main galaxies selected to a limiting magnitude of r < 17:5 using the angular and radial selection methods described in x 2, with a similar catalog obtained from the SDSS New York University Value Added Catalogue (NYU-VAGC; Blanton et al. 2005).”
K-Corrections and Filter Transformations in the Ultraviolet, Optical, and Near-Infrared (2006, methodology): “The SDSS, 2MASS, andGALEX galaxies were selected from and the matches were obtained by the New York University ValueAdded Galaxy Catalog (Blanton et al. 2005).”
A fundamental problem in our understanding of low-mass galaxy evolution (2012, methodology): “The group catalogue has been constructed by applying the halo-based group finder of Yang et al. (2005) to the New York University Value-Added Galaxy Catalogue (NYU-VAGC; Blanton et al. 2005).”
An Improved Photometric Calibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Imaging Data (2007, methodology): “Early versions of these calibrations have already been used for the creation of a number of auxiliary SDSS catalogs (e.g. Finkbeiner et al. 2004; Blanton et al. 2005) as well as a number of SDSS scientific publications (e.g. Tegmark et al. 2004; Eisenstein et al. 2005; Padmanabhan et al. 2007;…”
How sensitive are predicted galaxy luminosities to the choice of stellar population synthesis model (2013, result): “A2 shows the predicted (g-r) colour distribution at z =0 compared with SDSS observations (Blanton et al. 2005; Gonz´alez et al. 2009).”
What Aspects of Galaxy Environment Matter? (2006, methodology): “For example, we can measure as a function of galaxy properties the mean environments around galaxies (Hogg et al. 2003; Blanton et al. 2005a) or their correlation functions (Davis & Geller 1976; Santiago & Strauss 1992; Hermit et al. 1996; Norberg et al. 2002; Zehavi et al. 2004).”
Structural properties of pseudo-bulges, classical bulges and elliptical galaxies: a Sloan Digital Sky Survey perspective (2008, methodology): “Another possibility is to fit the entire galaxy as a single component, with a Sérsic function, and then use the Sérsic index so obtained (e.g. Blanton et al. 2005a,b; Häussler et al. 2007).”
MASS AND ENVIRONMENT AS DRIVERS OF GALAXY EVOLUTION. II. THE QUENCHING OF SATELLITE GALAXIES AS THE ORIGIN OF ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS (2011, methodology): “It applies a rather sophisticated iterative algorithm, calibrated on mock catalogues (see Yang et al. 2005), to the NYU Value-Added Galaxy Catalog (NYU-VAGC, Blanton et al. 2005), which is also based on the SDSS DR7 sample.”
The clustering of luminous red galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaging data (2006, methodology): “The above method has been briefly described by Finkbeiner et al. (2004) and Blanton et al. (2005), and will be explained in detail in a future publication.”
The clustering of the SDSS main galaxy sample – II. Mock galaxy catalogues and a measurement of the growth of structure from redshift space distortions at z = 0.15 (2014, methodology): “For our analysis, we start with the SDSS MGS value-added galaxy catalogue ‘safe0’ hosted by NYU1 (NYU-VAGC), which was created following the methods described in Blanton et al. (2005).”
The 2M++ galaxy redshift catalogue (2011, methodology): “The NYU-VAGC provides the SDSS survey mask in MANGLE format (Hamilton & Tegmark 2004).2 We sampled the mask on a HEALPix grid at Nside = 512 (∼10 arcminutes resolution).”
Inclination- and dust-corrected galaxy parameters: bulge-to-disc ratios and size–luminosity relations (2008, background): “The Sérsic radii from Blanton et al. (2005) — which Shen et al. additionally used — are also known to systematically underestimate the true effective half light radii as the Sérsic index increases (see Figure 9 from Blanton et al. 2005).”
Cosmic Voids in Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (2011, background): “Its main source is the New York University Value-Added Galaxy Catalog (NYU-VAGC) Large Scale Structure Sample (brvoid0) (Blanton et al. 2005) which includes 583,946 galaxies with 10 < r ≤ 17.6.”