The Phoenix Deep Survey

A. Hopkins¹, A. Georgakakis², J. Afonso³, B. Chan¹, L. Cram¹, B. Mobasher⁴, M. Sullivan⁵

University of Sydney
Imperial College, London
Observatorio Astronomico de Lisboa
Space Telescope Science Institute
University of Toronto

The Phoenix Deep Survey is a multiwavelength survey of a region a little over 2 degrees diameter in the southern constellation Phoenix. Observations have been made with many instruments, including:

1.4 GHz observations with the Australia Telescope Compact Array,
optical (R-band, V-band) and spectroscopic observations (2dF) with the Anglo-Australian Telescope,
deeper optical imaging with the WFI on the Anglo-Australian Telescope
NIR (K-band) imaging with the SofI instrument on the ESO NTT.
NIR (J and K-band) imaging with the OSIRIS instrument at CTIO.

The project is ongoing, and as additional data products and results are made public they will appear on this page.

The publication list from the Phoenix Deep Survey observations is ever growing. Please cite the relevant PDS publication if you make use of our work.

Here are some clickable colour images of one WFI field (a 30'x30' area), in the most sensitive portion of the radio survey, with radio contours overlayed.

Data products

Radio Images

The final ATCA 1.4 GHz mosaic image is now in the public domain, and various fits files can be downloaded. Refer to Hopkins et al 2003 AJ, 125, 465 for details.

phoenix_mosaic_all.fits: (95MB) The full mosaic image.
phoenix_mosaic_sens.fits: (95MB) The theoretical rms sensitivity image from the output of LINMOS.
phoenix_mosaic.fits: (75MB) The mosaic after trimming at the theoretical 250 microJy rms contour.
phoenix_mosaic_rms.fits: (75MB) The measured rms sensitivity for the trimmed image, estimated using 100x100 pixel regions over the image.

Radio Catalogues

Several PDS 1.4 GHz catalogues are also available. Again refer to Hopkins et al 2003 AJ, 125, 465 for details. The columns of these files are as follows:
1-6: RA and Dec (J2000);
7-8: peak flux density (mJy) and its uncertainty;
9-10: integrated flux density (mJy) and its uncertainty;
11-13: major, minor axes (arcsec) and position angle (degrees);
14: rms noise level (mJy) at the location of the source.

PDS_atca_fdr10_full.cat: (167kB) The full, unedited, 10% FDR threshold catalogue for the trimmed mosaic image. This catalogue contains 2090 sources.
PDS_atca_fdr10_full_vis.cat: (165kB) The 10% FDR threshold catalogue for the trimmed mosaic, visually edited to remove objects clearly associated with artifacts close to bright sources. This catalogue contains 2058 sources.
PDS_atca_fdr10_deep.cat: (39kB) The 10% FDR threshold catalogue for the 33'x33' region centered on the most sensitive portion of the mosaic. This catalogue contains 491 sources.
PDS_atca_fdr10_merge.cat: (172kB) The merged catalogue coming from PDS_atca_fdr10_full_vis.cat and PDS_atca_fdr10_deep.cat. This was constructed to contain all unique catalogued sources; where common sources were identified only the entry from PDS_atca_fdr10_deep.cat was retained. There are a total of 2148 sources in the final merged catalogue.

WFI Imaging and catalogues

Three WFI images within the most sensitive region of the radio image were observed using multiple optical filters. These have been detailed and published in Sullivan et al 2004, ApJS, 155, 1. The optical catalogues derived from these images are given here.

optical.form.cat This is an SExtractor style header detailing the format for the following ascii text file catalogue.
optical.phot.cat.gz (29MB) This is a gzipped ascii text file. It includes NIR data from the OSIRIS imaging (see below).
radio_optical.form.cat SExtractor style header for following radio/optical matched catalogue.
radio_optical.phot.cat.gz Gzipped ascii text file with radio/optical matched catalogue information.
spec_radio_optical.form.cat SExtractor style header for following spectroscopic information matched to radio/optical matched catalogue.
spec_radio_optical.phot.cat.gz Gzipped ascii text file with spectroscopic information added to the radio/optical matched catalogue.

The processed fits images from the WFI observations are also available, although too large (at just under 400MB each) to serve here. If you are interested in using the B, V, R, I images from Phoenix, please send email to Andrew Hopkins who can make these available.

K-band ISPI Images

More recent than the OSIRIS imaging (below), is K-band imaging with ISPI on the CTIO 4-m. These images cover 11 ISPI pointings, centred on the most sensitive portion of the radio image, and largely overlapping the central WFI image (extending slightly into the WFI images north and south of the central image). Some of the results from this imaging have been published in Smith et al 2008 AJ, 136, 358. The K-band catalogue for this imaging is here:

Kcatalog.cat An ascii text catalogue, with SExtractor format header.

The processed fits images for this K-band imaging are here. Each image is 64MB in size.

NIR (OSIRIS/CTIO) Images

Seven fields have been observed in J and K with OSIRIS on the CTIO 1.5 m telescope. These are detailed in Georgakakis et al 2004, MNRAS, 354,127. The processed images (fits format) for each of these fields are available here. See the file README for zeropoints.

OSIRIS_J1.fits (1.3MB); OSIRIS_K1.fits (956kB)
OSIRIS_J2.fits (802kB); OSIRIS_K2.fits (1.3MB)
OSIRIS_J3.fits (1.0MB); OSIRIS_K3.fits (1.0MB)
OSIRIS_J4.fits (1.4MB); OSIRIS_K4.fits (1.0MB)
OSIRIS_J5.fits (1.1MB); OSIRIS_K5.fits (1.4MB)
OSIRIS_J6.fits (1.0MB); OSIRIS_K6.fits (1.1MB)
OSIRIS_J7.fits (1.1MB); OSIRIS_K7.fits (1.1MB)

Published Tables

Tables 1 and 2 from Georgakakis et al 2004, MNRAS, 354,127 are available here in ascii format. The XMM-NEWTON area curve for 6-sigma detections in the 2-8keV band is given in the file area_curve_2080_6.dat.

table1.dat (5.9kB)
table2.dat (4.6kB)

The image below shows the ATCA mosaic at 1.4 GHz. This image has been normalised by subtracting a mean background value and dividing by local image rms noise values. This removes the effect of the varying sensitivity of the mosaic allowing most sources to be visible at once in this image. The image is trimmed at the 250 microJy theoretical noise level, with the black contours indicating the 90, 30 and 10 microJy theoretical rms noise levels. The outer white contour indicates the extent of the original 2 degree diameter 1.4 GHz survey of Hopkins et al. 1998, MNRAS, 296, 839. The inner white circle indicates the extent of the survey results described in Hopkins et al. 1999, ApJ, 519, L59. Please acknowledge one of the Phoenix Deep Survey publications in any work which makes use of the Phoenix survey data.

This page last updated on 2009/07/20.