New Data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Collaboration

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) Collaboration announces the public release of catalogs and ancillary data products from its Science Verification data. The DES Science Verification period was a post-commissioning testing phase during which a mini-survey was performed to a depth comparable to the 5-year DES survey. Between 1 November 2012 and 22 February 2013, 10,000+ exposures were collected by DECam (Flaugher, et al 2015) and subsequently reduced with an early version of the DES Data Management (DESDM) software stack (Sevilla et al. 2011, Mohr et al. 2012, Gruendl et al. in prep.). Both the raw and the reduced single-epoch images are available from the NOAO Science Archive.

The data products provided by the DES Collaboration come from the first annual reduction of the Science Verification images (denoted SVA1) and consist of object catalogs, value added quantities, and ancillary maps derived from the coadded SV images. The SVA1 GOLD Catalog provides photometry and simple classification for roughly 25 million objects detected in the SVA1 coadd images. Ancillary maps describing the effective magnitude limit across the SVA1 footprint are also provided. The SVA1 Shear Catalogs provide shape information for a high-quality subset of objects in the GOLD catalog as derived by Jarvis et al. (2015). The SVA1 Photo-z Catalogs provide photometric redshift estimates for objects in the SVA1 GOLD catalog as derived in Bonnett et al. (2015). Catalogs of galaxy clusters and red galaxies in the SVA1 data set are provided by the SVA1 RedMaPPer and RedMaGiC Catalogs as derived in Rykoff et al. (2016) and Rozo et al. (2015).

Access to the the DES SVA1 data is provided by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and can be found here.

Alex Drlica-Wagner and Joshua Frieman
Fermi National Accelerator Lab.