SAGE Overview

The Spitzer Space Telescope Survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud Legacy Project Surveying the Agents of a Galaxy's Evolution (SAGE) traces the life cycle of observable matter that drives the evolution of a galaxy's appearance. SAGE has revealed over 6 million sources including ~150,000 evolved stars, ~50,000 young stellar objects and the diffuse interstellar medium with column densities > 1.2×10²¹ cm ^-2. The data will provide fundamental insights into the physical processes of the interstellar medium, the formation of new stars and the injection of mass by evolved stars and their relationships on the galaxy-wide scale of the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The SAGE project page can be found here. The survey is described in Meixner et al. (2006). (AJ, 132, 2268). Also provided with the data release is the SAGE data delivery documentation [PDF]

SAGE MIPS Catalog & Full List Criteria

To be included in a Catalog, each source has to meet a number of criteria. The source had to be nearly point like with a correlation value 0.89. In regions where there is a significant structure in the surrounding region (identified as having a sigma > 0.25 in a 120" width square box), the source had to have a correlation value >0.91. There are a small number of sources with 24 um magnitudes between 4 and 8 which have unusually low uncertainties (i.e., high S/N). The origin of these sources is under investigation and seems to be related to edge effects in the AORs. In the meantime, these sources were removed from the 24 um catalogs. Finally, all sources had to have signal-to-noise values >5. The final catalogs likely have a few remaining unreliable sources, but we estimate this to be at the less than 1% error.

The Full Lists contain ALL the sources extracted from the mosaics, thus a user should be aware that it contains spurious sources. The full list may be useful to search for the potential counterparts to known sources.

For more details, see Section 8 of the SAGE Data Delivery Document [PDF].

SAGE MIPS Catalog Column Descriptions

Gator serves the following SAGE MIPS catalogs and archives:
SAGE Winter 2008 MIPS 24 um Catalog Epoch1 (34 columns [29 delivered + 5 IRSA-created], 76,238 data rows)
MIPS 24 um Catalog (34 columns [29 delivered + 5 IRSA-created], 81,519 data rows)
MIPS 24 um Full List (34 columns [29 delivered + 5 IRSA-created], 325,142 data rows)
MIPS 70 um Catalog (33 columns [28 delivered + 5 IRSA-created], 2,003 data rows)
MIPS 70 um Full List (33 columns [28 delivered + 5 IRSA-created], 15,189 data rows)
MIPS 160 um Catalog (33 columns [28 delivered + 5 IRSA-created], 381 data rows)
MIPS 160 um Full List (33 columns [28 delivered + 5 IRSA-created], 4,154 data rows)

In the column descriptions below, ch refers to the MIPS channel (24 um, 70 um, or 160 um).

Designation is
  SST = Spitzer Space Telescope
  M1  = MIPS 24um, M2 = MIPS 70um, M3 = MIPS 160um
  SAGE= LMC Survey project
  1   = epoch 1+2
  C   = Catalog
  J   = 2000.0 epoch
  HHMMSS.SS   Right ascension (hr, min, sec) of source
  sDDMMSS.S   Declination (deg, min, sec) of source