SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey Data Release 12: galaxy target selection and large-scale structure catalogues

By B. Reid, Shirley Ho, Nikhil Padmanabhan, Will J. Percival, J. Tinker, R. Tojeiro, M. White, Daniel J. Eisenstein, C. Maraston, A. Ross and 32 more. 2015

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The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) III project, has provided the largest survey of galaxy redshifts available to date, in terms of both the number of galaxy redshifts measured by a single survey, and the effective cosmological volume covered. Key to analysing the clustering of these data to provide cosmological measurements is understanding the detailed properties of this sample. Potential issues include variations in the target catalogue caused by changes either in the targeting algorithm or properties of the data used, the pattern of spectroscopic observations, the spatial distribution of targets for which redshifts were not obtained, and variations in the target sky density due to observational systematics. We document here the target selection algorithms used to create the galaxy samples that comprise BOSS. We also present the algorithms used to create large-scale structure catalogues for the final Data Release (DR12) samples and the associated random catalogues that quantify the survey mask. The algorithms are an evolution of those used by the BOSS team to construct catalogues from earlier data, and have been designed to accurately quantify the galaxy sample. The code used, designated MKSAMPLE, is released with this paper.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca936b59868ec76fb3f7580290d941c1ba992c3e

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Citations in the corpus

The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological analysis of the DR12 galaxy sample (2016, methodology): “The definitions and motivations for these weights are described in Reid et al. (2016) and Ross et al. (2016).”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: RSD measurement from the power spectrum and bispectrum of the DR12 BOSS galaxies (2016, methodology): “The full targeting algorithms used and the galaxy and random catalogues are presented in Reid et al. (2016).”
The first-year shear catalog of the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program Survey (2017, methodology): “…measurements as the goal of first-year HSC weak lensing science: the shear-shear correlation function using the entire shear catalog (no tomography), and the galaxy-shear correlation function (i.e., galaxy-galaxy lensing) using the SDSS-III/BOSS (Dawson et al. 2013) CMASS sample (Reid et al. 2016).”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Constraining modified gravity (2016, methodology): “The galaxy catalogues used, and mitigation techniques for their nuances are described in detail in (Reid et al. 2016), which also presents the targeting algorithm developed to select the galaxies: the galaxies were selected from photometry taken using the Sloan telescope (Gunn et al. 1998, 2006),…”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological implications of the configuration-space clustering wedges (2016, methodology): “Here, we use the full BOSS data set by combining all these samples as described in Reid et al. (2016).”
The cosmological analysis of the SDSS/BOSS data from the Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure (2019, methodology): “In this paper, we focus on the analysis of the power spectra monopole and quadrupole of the BOSS D12 data (see for example [51, 52, 53]).”
Elucidating ΛCDM: Impact of Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Measurements on the Hubble Constant Discrepancy (2017, background): “…more galaxies, notably the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS5), have led to both improved precision in the BAO scale measurements over a range of redshifts, and improved analysis methodologies (e.g., Percival et al. 2014; Anderson et al. 2014; Kazin et al. 2014; Reid et al. 2016).”
Lensing is Low: Cosmology, Galaxy Formation, or New Physics? (2016, methodology): “BOSS galaxies were selected from Data Release 8 (DR8, Aihara et al. 2011) ugriz imaging (Fukugita et al. 1996) using a series of colour–magnitude cuts (Reid et al. 2016).”
Galaxy Interactions Trigger Rapid Black Hole Growth: an unprecedented view from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “…< 17.77), the SDSS-DR12 BOSS survey (color-selected galaxies, and approximately stellar mass limited; see Dawson et al. 2013; Maraston et al. 2013; Reid et al. 2016; Leauthaud et al. 2016), the GAMA-DR2 survey (complete to r < 19.0), the PRIMUS survey (complete to i < 22.5; Coil et al 2011), the…”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: tomographic BAO analysis of DR12 combined sample in Fourier space (2016, methodology): “We refer the readers to table 2 of Reid et al. (2016) for more details of the DR12 combined sample.”
The clustering of the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey DR14 quasar sample: First measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations between redshift 0.8 and 2.2 (2017, methodology): “Again, our process for accounting for this incompleteness matches that described in Reid et al. (2016).”
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Twelfth data release (2016, methodology): “Spectra of all the SDSS-III/BOSS quasar candidates, all the SDSS-III quasar targets from ancillary programs and all the objects classified robustly as z ≥ 2 quasars by the SDSS pipeline (Bolton et al. 2012) among the galaxy targets (Reid et al. 2016) have been visually inspected.”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: modelling the clustering and halo occupation distribution of BOSS CMASS galaxies in the Final Data Release (2015, methodology): “Galaxies are selected from SDSS DR8 imaging (Aihara et al. 2011) according to a series of colour cuts designed to obtain a sample with approximately ‘constant stellar mass’ (Reid et al. 2016).”