The Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Project. I. Catalog Construction

Bundy, Kevin; Leauthaud, Alexie; Saito, Shun; Bolton, Adam; Lin, Yen-Ting; Maraston, Claudia; Nichol, Robert C.; Schneider, Donald P.; Thomas, Daniel and Wake, David A. (2015). The Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Project. I. Catalog Construction. Astrophysical Journal Supplement, 221(1), article no. 15.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/0067-0049/221/1/15

Abstract

The Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Catalog (^_s82-^_MGC) is the largest-volume stellar mass-limited sample of galaxies beyond z ≈ 0.1 constructed to date. Spanning 139.4 deg², the ^_s82-^_MGC includes a mass-limited sample of 41,770 galaxies with log M_*/M_⊙≳ 11.2 to z ≈ 0.7, sampling a volume of 0.3 Gpc³, roughly equivalent to the volume of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-I/II (SDSS-I/II) z < 0.15 ^_MAIN sample. The catalog is built on three pillars of survey data: the SDSS Stripe 82 Coadd photometry which reaches r-band magnitudes of ~23.5 AB, Y JHK photometry at depths of 20th magnitude (AB) from the UK Infrared Deep Sky Survey Large Area Survey, and over 70,000 spectroscopic galaxy redshifts from the SDSS-I/II and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. We describe the catalog construction and verification, the production of 9-band matched aperture photometry, tests of existing and newly estimated photometric redshifts required to supplement spectroscopic redshifts for 55% of the log M_*/M_⊙≳ 11.2 sample, and geometric masking. We provide near-IR based stellar mass estimates and compare these to previous estimates. All catalog products are made publicly available. The ^_s82-^_MGC not only addresses previous statistical limitations in high-mass galaxy evolution studies, but also begins tackling inherent data challenges in the coming era of wide-field imaging surveys.

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