The 6dF Galaxy Survey: Samples, Observational Techniques and the First Data Release
astro-ph
/ Authors
D. Heath Jones, Will Saunders, Matthew Colless, Mike A. Read, Quentin A. Parker, Fred G. Watson, Lachlan A. Campbell, Daniel Burkey, Thomas Mauch, Malcolm Hartley
and 13 more authors
Paul Cass, Dionne James, Ken Russell, Kristin Fiegert, John Dawe, John Huchra, Tom Jarrett, Ofer Lahav, John Lucey, Gary A. Mamon, Dominique Proust, Elaine M. Sadler, Ken-ichi Wakamatsu
/ Abstract
The 6dF Galaxy Survey (6dFGS) aims to measure the redshifts of around 150,000 galaxies, and the peculiar velocities of a 15,000-member sub-sample, over almost the entire southern sky. When complete, it will be the largest redshift survey of the nearby universe, reaching out to about z ~ 0.15, and more than an order of magnitude larger than any peculiar velocity survey to date. The targets are all galaxies brighter than K_tot = 12.75 in the 2MASS Extended Source Catalog (XSC), supplemented by 2MASS and SuperCOSMOS galaxies that complete the sample to limits of (H, J, r_F, b_J) = (13.05, 13.75, 15.6, 16.75). Central to the survey is the Six-Degree Field (6dF) multi-fibre spectrograph, an instrument able to record 150 simultaneous spectra over the 5.7-degree field of the UK Schmidt Telescope. An adaptive tiling algorithm has been employed to ensure around 95% fibering completeness over the 17046 sq.deg of the southern sky with | b | > 10 deg. Spectra are obtained in two observations using separate V and R gratings, that together give R ~ 1000 over at least 4000 -- 7500 Angstroms and signal-to-noise ratio ~10 per pixel. The 6dFGS database is available at http://www-wfau.roe.ac.uk/6dFGS/, with public data releases occuring after the completion of each third of the survey.