PEP SPIRE 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).

As in the case of PACS data, SPIRE blind catalogs have been extracted using the Starfinder (Diolaiti et al. 2000a,b) code. The adopted PSFs used are the standard empirical PSFs determined from observations of Neptune (see the SPIRE Beam Model Release Note, Sibthorpe et al. 2011). For each cluster, the PSF is trimmed and rotated to the position angle of the observations. The flux errors returned by Starfinder are smaller than the 1 sigma noise in the error map by a factor of 1.5-2.0. Because these flux errors are artificially small, we provide in the released catalogs errors and S/N values both from the Starfinder extraction (FLUXERR-SF) and by averaging the error map on a 3x3 pixel area centered on the position of the detection (FLUXERR-MAP). We recommed the use of the latter. The released catalogs include all sources above a given flux. This cut is applied at 10, 8.5 and 10.0 mJy at 250, 350 and 500 microns, respectively. See the documentation for further details.