The Subaru Deep Field (SDF): focus on stars

The Subaru Deep Field (SDF for short) is a small region of the sky which has been studied itensively with the very large Subaru telescope.

• The 8.5-m Subaru Telescope is run by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
• The official SDF Project homepage
• The SDF Sky Walker provides a nice graphical interface for browsing this region of the sky.

After collecting images in several passbands in 2002 and 2003, the SDF Project reduced all the data into a set of composite images. They measured the properties of all objects they could find in all the images, creating a set of catalogs with hundreds of thousands of objects.

• Kashikawa et al. (PASJ 56, 1011, 2004) describes the data, reductions, and catalogs in detail.
• The SDF Data Products are freely available to all.

The main focus of the SDF Project is on extragalactic science. However, hundreds and probably thousands of stars also fall within the SDF boundaries. I tried to find ways to distinguish stars from galaxies in the SDF catalogs, using both shape and color information. Below are the results of my work, which I also make freely available to all.

sdf_stars.ps

Preprint of paper describing the stellar locus in the SDF, how one can use it to distinguish stars from galaxies, and the creation of a new set of fields for objects in the SDF catalogs. There is also a copy in PDF format.

sdf_locus_class.dat

The big data file with shape, color and locus-based measurements of all objects in R_c-based catalogs.
Warning: a few of the lines in this big ASCII text file may have fields which are not separated by a space; in other words, one numerical value may run into the adjacent value. I have made a copy of the data file with an extra space inserted between such fields: download version with extra spaces.

sdf_locus_class.txt

ASCII text explanation of the sdf_locus_class.dat file.

Last modified by Michael Richmond 12/06/2005