Re: CFHT multi-goal wide wide wide survey

     Dear Ray

    I am very supportive on this WWW-CFHT-SDSS++ idea, for large scale
structure, BAO, weak and strong lensing. We have to be sure we do not
duplicate Pann-STARSS, however.

     Cheers

yannick

Ray Carlberg wrote:
> [Please circulate and please reply to build an email list--this one is
> probably a small subset of those interested.]
> At the recent CFHT User's Meeting in Marseille many of you had great
> ideas about how a 5-10,000 square degree Megaprime survey could be used
> to enable a large range of new science opportunities that span
> everything from the solar system to z~7 objects. The basic idea is to go
> 2-3 mags deeper than the SDSS, placed exactly on top of the SDSS survey
> to allow their spectroscopy, photometry and astrometry to be used. An
> interesting mid-term idea is to develop a wide field spectrograph to
> later acquire spectra.
>
> Aside from the immediate science, this survey could be an important
> driver for ALMA, JWST and E-ELT/TMT observations.
>
> Science drivers include:
> o large scale structure out to z~1.5 (including BAO measurements, if
> competitive at time-of-survey)
> o high redshift "drop-outs" (qso's mainly)
> o solar system dynamical mapping, including the high latitude population
> o galactic structure, with proper motions immediately available at the
> SDSS brightness level
> o galaxy clusters, for themselves and to build a large sample of strong
> arcs which will be important for 8m and ELT observations
> o local galaxies in the 10,000 square degree sky.
>
> The strength of this idea is that there is no single science driver, and
> many new ones would likely appear as the data were acquired. Ideally the
> survey would be managed by a fairly broad committee that would try to
> optimize all the science returns with the highest possible observational
> efficiency.
>
> It is possible to acquire 10-20 one square degree images per hour. This
> means that 10,000 sq degrees cost 500 hours, or about 100 nights for
> single filter images. Depending on repeats (and duration of the repeat)
> and number of filters this will bring the survey into the 500 night
> range of the CFHTLS. There is clearly at least one factor of 2 or so
> uncertainty in this estimate, but it is certainly feasible without
> taking the whole telescope time and should be of very broad interest and
> utility. The data would ideally be available for the supporting
> communities and there would be some committment to provide reduced data
> products.
>
> Those that are interested should start to develop these ideas to a much
> more precise level and be ready for a call for proposals. Ideally we
> could all get this underway as soon as possible--a quick start would be
> invaluable.
>
Received on Sat May 12 2007 - 00:09:41 HST