Dark Energy Survey Releases Year-1 High-Level Data

On 1 October, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) made public a large set of value-added data derived from the images and catalogs from the first year (Y1) of the survey. All of these Y1 products can be accessed from the DES Data Management webpage.

These higher-level data were produced by the DES Collaboration for recent publications constraining the properties of dark matter and dark energy. The newly released data include: enhanced object catalogs with the photometry, photometric redshifts, shape estimates, and object selections used in the cosmological analyses; survey characterization maps and PSF models; data vectors and covariance matrices for the 2-point statistics used in cosmological analyses; and the Markov chains that sample the cosmological parameter constraints.

These high-level data will be of great use to anyone who wishes to combine DES Y1 cosmological constraints with other data or new models, or use the catalog-level information to create new statistics. We also remind AAS members that images and catalogs from the first three years of DES observations are already public in the DES Data Release 1.