The DECam Plane Survey: Optical photometry of two billion objects in the southern Galactic plane

TL;DR

The DECam Plane Survey provides extensive optical and near-infrared photometry of two billion objects in the southern Galactic plane, enabling detailed studies of the Milky Way's structure and interstellar medium.

Contribution

This survey offers the first large-scale, deep, multi-band optical dataset of the southern Galactic plane with high-precision photometry for billions of stars.

Findings

High-precision positions and fluxes for two billion stars

Deep coverage reaching past the Galactic center's main-sequence turn-off

Publicly available dataset for Galactic structure studies

Abstract

The DECam Plane Survey is a five-band optical and near-infrared survey of the southern Galactic plane with the Dark Energy Camera at Cerro Tololo. The survey is designed to reach past the main-sequence turn-off at the distance of the Galactic center through a reddening E(B-V) of 1.5 mag. Typical single-exposure depths are 23.7, 22.8, 22.3, 21.9, and 21.0 mag in the grizY bands, with seeing around 1 arcsecond. The footprint covers the Galactic plane with |b| < 4 degrees, 5 degrees > l > -120 degrees. The survey pipeline simultaneously solves for the positions and fluxes of tens of thousands of sources in each image, delivering positions and fluxes of roughly two billion stars with better than 10 mmag precision. Most of these objects are highly reddened and deep in the Galactic disk, probing the structure and properties of the Milky Way and its interstellar medium. The full survey is publicly available.