A 12um ISOCAM Survey of the ESO-Sculptor Field: Data Reduction and Analysis

TL;DR

This paper details the data reduction, catalog creation, and analysis of a 12um mid-infrared survey of the ESO-Sculptor field, including source detection, star/galaxy separation, and flux calibration, providing a comprehensive dataset for galaxy studies.

Contribution

It introduces a complete 12um source catalog with flux calibration and star/galaxy separation, and corrects for incompleteness using two independent methods, advancing mid-infrared survey analysis.

Findings

Catalog of 142 sources with flux >0.24mJy

Complete to 1mJy flux level after correction

Consistent flux calibration using stellar templates

Abstract

We present a detailed reduction of a mid-infrared 12um (LW10 filter) ISOCAM open time observation performed on the ESO-Sculptor Survey field (Arnouts et al. 1997). A complete catalogue of 142 sources (120 galaxies and 22 stars), detected with high significance (equivalent to 5sigma), is presented above an integrated flux density of 0.24mJy. Star/galaxy separation is performed by a detailed study of colour-colour diagrams. The catalogue is complete to 1mJy and below this flux density the incompleteness is corrected using two independent methods. The first method uses stars and the second uses optical counterparts of the ISOCAM galaxies; these methods yield consistent results. We also apply an empirical flux density calibration using stars in the field. For each star, the 12um flux density is derived by fitting optical colours from a multi-band chi^2 to stellar templates (BaSel-2.0) and using empirical optical-IR colour-colour relations. This article is a companion analysis to Rocca-Volmerange 2007 et al. where the 12um faint galaxy counts are presented and analysed by galaxy type with the evolutionary code PEGASE.3.