Issue |
A&A
Volume 560, December 2013
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A94 | |
Number of page(s) | 27 | |
Section | Astronomical instrumentation | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201321814 | |
Published online | 11 December 2013 |
On-sky characterisation of the VISTA NB118 narrow-band filters at 1.19 μm⋆
1 Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Juliane Maries Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
e-mail: milvang@dark-cosmology.dk
2 European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany
3 TERAPIX/Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, UMR 7095 CNRS, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 98bis boulevard Arago, 75014 Paris, France
4 Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, LAM (Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille) UMR 7326, 13388 Marseille, France
5 Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA), Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Royal Observatory, Edinburgh EH9 3HJ, UK
6 Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, PO Box 9513, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
Received: 1 May 2013
Accepted: 18 October 2013
Observations of the high redshift Universe through narrow-band filters have proven very successful in the last decade. The 4-m VISTA telescope, equipped with the wide-field camera VIRCAM, offers a major step forward in wide-field near-infrared imaging, and in order to utilise VISTA’s large field-of-view and sensitivity, the Dark Cosmology Centre provided a set of 16 narrow-band filters for VIRCAM. These NB118 filters are centered at a wavelength near 1.19 μm in a region with few airglow emission lines. The filters allow the detection of Hα emitters at z = 0.8, Hβ and [O iii] emitters at z ≈ 1.4, [O ii] emitters at z = 2.2, and Lyα emitters at z = 8.8. Based on guaranteed time observations of the COSMOS field we here present a detailed description and characterization of the filters and their performance. In particular we provide sky-brightness levels and depths for each of the 16 detector/filter sets and find that some of the filters show signs of some red-leak. We identify a sample of 2 × 103 candidate emission-line objects in the data. Cross-correlating this sample with a large set of galaxies with known spectroscopic redshifts we determine the “in situ” passbands of the filters and find that they are shifted by about 3.5 − 4 nm (corresponding to 30% of the filter width) to the red compared to the expectation based on the laboratory measurements. Finally, we present an algorithm to mask out persistence in VIRCAM data. Scientific results extracted from the data will be presented separately.
Key words: techniques: photometric / instrumentation: photometers / methods: observational / galaxies: photometry / galaxies: high-redshift
© ESO, 2013
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