The Spitzer-IRAC/MIPS Extragalactic Survey (SIMES) in the South Ecliptic Pole Field
Rodighiero, G.; Papovich, C.; Salvato, M.; Hayes, M.; Franceschini, A.; Marchetti, L.; Vaccari, M.; Scoville, N. Z.; Surace, J.; Serjeant, S.; Scarlata, C.; Pearson, C.; Malkan, M.; Takeuchi, T. T.; Mei, S.; Hibon, P.; Atek, H.; Colbert, J.; Menéndez-Delmestre, K.; Capak, P. L.; Teplitz, H. I.; Baronchelli, I.; Kovacs, A.; Urrutia, T.; Scott, K. S.; Kirkpatrick, J. D.; Sedgwick, C.; Devlin, M.
United States, Italy, France, South Africa, United Kingdom, Chile, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan
Abstract
We present the Spitzer-IRAC/MIPS Extragalactic survey (SIMES) in the South Ecliptic Pole field. The large area covered (7.7 deg2), together with one of the lowest Galactic cirrus emissions in the entire sky and a very extensive coverage by Spitzer, Herschel, Akari, and GALEX, make the SIMES field ideal for extragalactic studies. The elongated geometry of the SIMES area (≈4:1), allowing for significant cosmic variance reduction, further improves the quality of statistical studies in this field. Here we present the reduction and photometric measurements of the Spitzer/IRAC data. The survey reaches depths of 1.93 and 1.75 μJy (1σ) at 3.6 and 4.5 μm, respectively. We discuss the multiwavelength IRAC-based catalog, completed with optical, mid-, and far-IR observations. We detect 341,000 sources with {F}3.6μ {{m}}≥slant 3σ . Of these, 10% have an associated 24 μm counterpart, while 2.7% have an associated SPIRE source. We release the catalog through the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive. Two scientific applications of these IRAC data are presented in this paper. First, we compute integral number counts at 3.6 μm. Second, we use the [3.6]-[4.5] color index to identify galaxy clusters at z > 1.3. We select 27 clusters in the full area, a result consistent with previous studies at similar depth.