J/ApJS/216/4 SDSS-RM project: technical overview (Shen+, 2015)
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping project: technical overview.
Shen Y., Brandt W.N., Dawson K.S., Hall P.B., McGreer I.D., Anderson S.F.,
Chen Y., Denney K.D., Eftekharzadeh S., Fan X., Gao Y., Green P.J.,
Greene J.E., Ho L.C., Horne K., Jiang L., Kelly B.C., Kinemuchi K.,
Kochanek C.S., Paris I., Peters C.M., Peterson B.M., Petitjean P.,
Ponder K., Richards G.T., Schneider D.P., Seth A., Smith R.N.,
Strauss M.A., Tao C., Trump J.R., Wood-Vasey W.M., Zu Y., Eisenstein D.J.,
Pan K., Bizyaev D., Malanushenko V., Malanushenko E., Oravetz D.
<Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser., 216, 4 (2015)>
=2015ApJS..216....4S 2015ApJS..216....4S
ADC_Keywords: QSOs ; Redshifts ; Spectroscopy ; Photometry, SDSS ; Surveys
Keywords: black hole physics; galaxies: active; line: profiles;
quasars: general; surveys
Abstract:
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project
is a dedicated multi-object RM experiment that has spectroscopically
monitored a sample of 849 broad-line quasars in a single 7deg2 field
with the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
spectrograph. The RM quasar sample is flux-limited to ipsf=21.7mag,
and covers a redshift range of 0.1<z<4.5 without any other cuts on
quasar properties. Optical spectroscopy was performed during 2014
January-July dark/gray time, with an average cadence of ∼4 days,
totaling more than 30 epochs. Supporting photometric monitoring in the
g and i bands was conducted at multiple facilities including the
Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) and the Steward Observatory Bok
telescope in 2014, with a cadence of ∼2 days and covering all lunar
phases. The RM field (RAJ2000=14:14:49.00, DEJ2000=+53:05:00.0) lies
within the CFHT-LS W3 field, and coincides with the Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1)
Medium Deep Field MD07, with three prior years of multi-band PS1 light
curves. The SDSS-RM six month baseline program aims to detect time
lags between the quasar continuum and broad line region (BLR)
variability on timescales of up to several months (in the observed
frame) for ∼10% of the sample, and to anchor the time baseline for
continued monitoring in the future to detect lags on longer timescales
and at higher redshift. SDSS-RM is the first major program to
systematically explore the potential of RM for broad-line quasars at
z>0.3, and will investigate the prospects of RM with all major broad
lines covered in optical spectroscopy.
Description:
Our reverberation mapping (RM) field is the Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) Medium
Deep Field (MDF) MD07 (RAJ2000=213.704, DEJ2000=+53.083), which is a
7deg2 field within the CFHT-LS W3 field. This field is fully covered
in the SDSS-I/II and SDSS-III BOSS footprints.
The final RM sample contains 849 quasars, each of which was assigned a
fiber on the RM plates. The remaining fibers were allocated to
calibration sources, including 70 spectrophotometric standard stars,
80 sky fibers, and 1 LRG target (enforced by the BOSS tiling
algorithm, but actually not tiled on any existing object in SDSS
imaging).
The BOSS spectroscopic observations were acquired during 7 dark/gray
runs from 2014 January 1 to 2014 July 3. The separation between epochs
in a given run is roughly 3-4 days, but varies from run to run under
different weather conditions. Typically five epochs were taken for
each run when weather permitted, totaling 32 epochs.
The main portion of the RM imaging of our program is obtained with the
CFHT/MegaCam and the Steward Observatory Bok 2.3m/90Prime. Given that
our RM sample covers a wide redshift range, the photometric monitoring
is performed in the SDSS g band and i band to sample the quasar
continuum at low and high redshifts, respectively. We also had six
nights of KPNO-4m (Mayall)/MOSAIC-1.1 observation to perform
multi-band (Ugriz) imaging of the RM field.
File Summary:
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FileName Lrecl Records Explanations
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ReadMe 80 . This file
table1.dat 758 1000 The tiled sample
table2.dat 56 32 Log of BOSS RM observations
sp.dat 24 32000 List of spectra for the 32 epochs by object
table3.dat 16 589 Mask of sky pixels
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See also:
II/317 : The CFHTLS Survey (T0007 release) (Hudelot+ 2012)
V/139 : The SDSS Photometric Catalog, Release 9 (Adelman-McCarthy+, 2012)
VII/269 : SDSS Quasar Catalog, DR9Q (Paris+, 2012)
VII/260 : The SDSS-DR7 quasar catalog (Schneider+, 2010)
II/282 : The SDSS Photometric Catalog, Release 6 (Adelman-McCarthy+, 2007)
J/ApJS/215/12 : BOSS narrow CIV absorption lines. II. zem>2.4 (Chen+, 2014)
J/ApJ/773/14 : BOSS: quasar luminosity function (Ross+, 2013)
J/ApJ/755/60 : Reverberation mapping for 5 Seyfert 1 galaxies (Grier+, 2012)
J/ApJ/753/125 : NIR spectroscopy follow-up of 60 SDSS-DR7 QSOs (Shen+, 2012)
J/ApJ/750/99 : The Pan-STARRS1 photometric system (Tonry+, 2012)
J/ApJS/199/3 : The quasars MMT-BOSS pilot survey (Ross+, 2012)
J/ApJS/194/45 : QSO properties from SDSS-DR7 (Shen+, 2011)
J/ApJ/732/121 : V-band and Hβ monitoring of Z299-15 (Barth+, 2011)
J/ApJ/716/993 : LAMP: reverberation mapping of H and He lines (Bentz+, 2010)
J/ApJ/698/895 : Variations in QSOs optical flux (Kelly+, 2009)
J/ApJS/180/67 : Photometric selection of QSOs from SDSS. II. (Richards+, 2009)
J/ApJ/680/169 : SDSS DR5 virial black hole masses (Shen+, 2008)
J/ApJ/666/757 : CIV 1549Å emission line in AGNs (Sulentic+, 2007)
J/ApJ/654/115 : DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: SDSS QSOs (Coil+, 2007)
J/AJ/131/2766 : Quasar luminosity function from SDSS-DR3 (Richards+, 2006)
J/AJ/131/84 : AGNs and host galaxies information (Vanden Berk+, 2006)
J/ApJ/613/682 : AGN central masses & broad-line region sizes (Peterson+, 2004)
http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/Science/CFHTLS/ : CFHTLS survey home page
http://www.sdss3.org/ : SDSS-III home page
http://www.sdssrm.org/ : SDSS-RM home page
Byte-by-byte Description of file: table1.dat
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Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
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1- 3 I3 --- Seq [0/999] Index of objects in this catalog (RMID)
5- 14 F10.6 deg RAdeg Right ascension in decimal degrees (J2000) (1)
16- 24 F9.6 deg DEdeg Declination in decimal degrees (J2000) (1)
26- 31 F6.4 --- z [0.1/4.4]?=0 Redshift (2)
33- 40 A8 --- Type Source type (3)
42- 47 F6.3 mag umag [16.8/26]?=0 u-band PSF magnitude (asinh) in
SDSS filter; undereddened
49- 54 F6.3 mag gmag [16.2/23.7]?=0 g-band PSF magnitude (asinh) in
SDSS filter; undereddened
56- 61 F6.3 mag rmag [16/22.8]?=0 r-band PSF magnitude (asinh) in
SDSS filter; undereddened
63- 68 F6.3 mag imag [15.8/21.7]?=0 i-band PSF magnitude (asinh) in
SDSS filter; undereddened
70- 75 F6.3 mag zmag [15.8/22.9]?=0 z-band PSF magnitude (asinh) in
SDSS filter; undereddened
77 I1 --- OT [0/6] Object type (0=unknown, 3=extended source or
6=point source)
79- 82 A4 --- Sample Sample ID (4)
84-243 32I5 --- Plate [7338/7340] SDSS plate(s) for 32 epochs (5)
245-404 32I5 --- Fiber [1/1000] SDSS fiber(s) for 32 epochs (5)
406-597 32I6 --- MJD [56660/56837] SDSS Modified Julian Date(s) for
28 epochs (5)
599-758 32F5.1 --- S/N [-1.5/81.7] Median S/N/pixel of each epoch
(over full wavelength range)
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Note (1): Object positions are from the corrected SDSS astrometry discussed in
DR10 (Ahn et al. 2014ApJS..211...17A 2014ApJS..211...17A).
Note (2): Redshifts are measured by running the SDSS redshift pipeline (Bolton
et al. 2012AJ....144..144B 2012AJ....144..144B) on the coadded spectra from all epochs
and visually verified.
Note (3): Types are:
RM_TILE1 = RM targets tile 1 (230 QSOs)
RM_TILE2 = RM targets tile 2 (619 QSOs)
LRG = luminous red galaxy target (1 source)
STD = Spectrophotometric standard F-stars (70 sources)
SKY = Sky fibers (80 sources)
Note (4): Sample are:
boss = BOSS DR9 quasar sample (Paris et al. 2012, VII/269);
dr7 = SDSS Data Release 7 (DR7) quasars (Shen et al. 2011, J/ApJS/194/45);
mmt = Follow-up spectroscopy with MMT/Hectospec
(P. J. Green et al., in preparation)
egs = quasars in the EGS field discovered by the DEEP2 survey
(Newman et al. 2013ApJS..208....5N 2013ApJS..208....5N)
Note (5): The Plate, Fiber and MJD columns record the spectroscopic
identifications for all epochs of each target.
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Byte-by-byte Description of file: table2.dat
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Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
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1- 7 A7 --- Date UT months of observation (in year 2014)
9- 10 I2 --- Epoch [1/32] Epoch number (1)
11 A1 --- f_Epoch [ab] low quality spectra (2)
13- 17 I5 d MJDs [56659/56837] Start Modified Julian Date
19- 23 I5 d MJDe [56660/56837] End Modified Julian Date
25- 33 F9.3 d Mean Modified Julian Date
35- 44 A10 --- File Plate-MJDe file identifier
46- 49 F4.1 --- S/N [0.5/34.2] Plate S/N
51- 52 I2 --- N [2/11] Number of coadded 15 minute
sub-exposures in each epoch
54- 56 F3.1 arcsec Seeing [1.3/3] Median seeing during the observation
estimated from the guide camera images
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Note (1): Except for Epochs 1 and 6, all epochs were observed on the same night.
Note (2): Flag as follows:
a = Epochs that have a plate S/N<5 due to poor observing conditions. Most of
the targets on these plates should be discarded in the cross-correlation
analysis due to the poor spectral quality.
b = Epoch 56825 suffered from a software error with no simultaneous
calibration exposures taken for science exposures. Afternoon calibration
exposures were used in reduction.
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Byte-by-byte Description of file: sp.dat
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Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1- 3 I3 --- Seq [0/999] Index of objects in this catalog (RMID)
5- 8 I4 --- Plate SDSS plate
10- 13 I4 --- Fiber SDSS fiber
15- 19 I5 --- MJD SDSS Modified Julian Date
21- 24 F4.1 --- S/N Median S/N per pixel (over full wavelength range)
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Byte-by-byte Description of file: table3.dat
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Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
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1- 9 F9.3 0.1nm lambda [5458.8/10296.8] Wavelength in angstroms (1)
11- 16 F6.4 [0.1nm] loglambda [3.7371/4.0127] Logarithmic wavelength (1)
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Note (1): Central wavelengths of sky pixels within [5000,10300]Å,
generated using the sky spectra from the SDSS-RM program and
following the approach in Wild & Hewett (2005MNRAS.358.1083W 2005MNRAS.358.1083W).
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History:
From electronic version of the journal
(End) Greg Schwarz [AAS], Emmanuelle Perret [CDS] 11-Feb-2015