CALIFA, the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey

© ESO 2013. Artículo firmado por 75 autores. CALIFA is the first legacy survey being performed at Calar Alto. The CALIFA collaboration would like to thank the IAA-CSIC and MPIAMPG as major partners of the observatory, and CAHA itself, for the unique access to telescope time and support in manpower and infrastructures. The CALIFA collaboration thanks also the CAHA staff for the dedication to this project. We thank the Viabilidad Diseño Acceso y Mejora funding program, ICTS-2009-10, for funding the data acquisition of this project. We thank the referee Mark Westmoquette for a prompt report with many valuable comments that improved the clarity of the article. B.H. gratefully acknowledges the support by the DFG via grant Wi 1369/29-1. K.J. was supported by the Emmy Noether Programme of the german DFG under grant Ja 1114/3-1. S.F.S., F.F.R.O., and D.M. thank the Plan Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo funding programs, AYA2010-22111-C03-03 and AYA2010-10904E, of the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, for the support given to this project. S.F.S. also thanks the the Ramón y Cajal project RyC-2011-07590 of the spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, for the support giving to this project. R.C.F. acknowledges the support of the brazilian agencies CAPES and CNPq. J.F.-B. acknowledges support from the Ramón y Cajal Program financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO). This research has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grants AYA2010-21322-C03-02 and AIB-2010-DE-00227. R.G.-B. has been supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under grant AYA2010-15081. R.A.M. was also funded by the spanish programme of International Campus of Excellence Moncloa (CEI). D.M. and A.M.I. are supported by the Spanish Research Council within the program JAE-Doc, Junta para la Ampliación de Estudios, co-funded by the FSE. F.F.R.-O. acknowledge fi- nancial support for the ESTALLIDOS
We present the first public data release (DR1) of the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) survey. It consists of science-grade optical datacubes for the first 100 of eventually 600 nearby (0.005 < z < 0.03) galaxies, obtained with the integral-field spectrograph PMAS/PPak mounted on the 3.5 m telescope at the Calar Alto observatory. The galaxies in DR1 already cover a wide range of properties in color-magnitude space, morphological type, stellar mass, and gas ionization conditions. This offers the potential to tackle a variety of open questions in galaxy evolution using spatially resolved spectroscopy. Two different spectral setups are available for each galaxy, (i) a low-resolution V500 setup covering the nominal wavelength range 3745-7500 angstrom with a spectral resolution of 6.0 angstrom (FWHM), and (ii) a medium-resolution V1200 setup covering the nominal wavelength range 3650-4840 angstrom with a spectral resolution of 2.3 angstrom (FWHM). We present the characteristics and data structure of the CALIFA datasets that should be taken into account for scientific exploitation of the data, in particular the effects of vignetting, bad pixels and spatially correlated noise. The data quality test for all 100 galaxies showed that we reach a median limiting continuum sensitivity of 1.0 x 10(-18) erg s(-1) cm(-2) angstrom(-1) arcsec(-2) at 5635 angstrom and 2.2 x 10(-18) erg s(-1) cm(-2) angstrom(-1) arcsec(-2) at 4500 angstrom for the V500 and V1200 setup respectively, which corresponds to limiting r and g band surface brightnesses of 23.6 mag arcsec(-2) and 23.4 mag arcsec(-2), or an unresolved emission-line flux detection limit of roughly 1 x 10(-17) erg s(-1) cm(-2) arcsec(-2) and 0.6 x 10(-17) erg s(-1) cm(-2) arcsec(-2), respectively. The median spatial resolution is 3 ''.7, and the absolute spectrophotometric calibration is better than 15% (1 sigma). We also describe the available interfaces and tools that allow easy access to this first public CALIFA d
Viabilidad Diseño Acceso y Mejora
DFG
Emmy Noether Programme of the german DFG
Plan Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo of the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
Ramón y Cajal of the spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad
Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO)
Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
Spanish programme of International Campus of Excellence Moncloa (CEI)
Spanish Research Council within the program JAE-Doc
FSE
FCT
Czech program for the long-term development of the research institution
Czech Academy of Sciences
Junta de Andalucía
Ramón y Cajal programme
MICINN
FCT/MCTES (Portugal)
POPH/FSE (EC)
Marie Curie IntraEuropean Reintegration grant
Plan Nacional del Espacio del Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia
European Research Council
PNAYA
Depto. de Física de la Tierra y Astrofísica
Fac. de Ciencias Físicas
TRUE
pub