High-quality Extragalactic Legacy-field Monitoring (HELM) with DECam
arxiv(2024)
Abstract
High-quality Extragalactic Legacy-field Monitoring (HELM) is a long-term
observing program that photometrically monitors several well-studied
extragalactic legacy fields with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) imager on the
CTIO 4m Blanco telescope. Since Feb 2019, HELM has been monitoring regions
within COSMOS, XMM-LSS, CDF-S, S-CVZ, ELAIS-S1, and SDSS Stripe 82 with few-day
cadences in the (u)gri(z) bands, over a collective sky area of ∼ 38
deg^2. The main science goal of HELM is to provide high-quality optical
light curves for a large sample of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and to build
decades-long time baselines when combining past and future optical light curves
in these legacy fields. These optical images and light curves will facilitate
the measurements of AGN reverberation mapping lags, as well as studies of AGN
variability and its dependences on accretion properties. In addition, the
time-resolved and coadded DECam photometry will enable a broad range of science
applications from galaxy evolution to time-domain science. We describe the
design and implementation of the program and present the first data release
that includes source catalogs and the first ∼ 3.5 years of light curves
during 2019A–2022A.
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