PEP PACS Extraction with 24 micron Priors Catalog Definitions

Overview

The PACS Evolutionary Probe (PEP, Lutz et al. 2011) is a Herschel guaranteed time deep extragalactic survey (KPGT_dlutz_1) targeting six among the most popular "blank fields", ten lensing clusters of galaxies, and two z ~1 clusters at wavelengths of 100, and 160 microns. PEP includes SPIRE observations of the two z ~1 clusters at wavelengths of 250, 350, and 500 microns. SPIRE coverage of all other fields is available from the HerMES survey (Oliver et al. 2010). In addition, deep SPIRE GOODS-N data are provided by the GOODS-Herschel program (Elbaz et al. 2011).

In addition to the blind catalogs extracted with Starfinder, PEP also provides a catalog obtained using 24 micron position priors and PSF-fitting. The catalogs of priors used for each blank field are listed in Table 16 of the documentation, and are mostly based on an extraction driven by IRAC source positions. Priors extraction of PACS fluxes is obtained following the method described in Magnelli et al. (2009). Users should keep in mind that the error estimate does not take into account confusion noise. PEP recommends to use any flux below 0.6 mJy in the green band and below 2.0 mJy in the red band with care.