Spitzer Observations of the North Ecliptic Pole

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed infrared photometric catalog of the North Ecliptic Pole region from Spitzer observations, enabling diverse astrophysical studies of extragalactic objects, stars, and background light.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive, deep infrared source catalog for the NEP, including data reduction, completeness analysis, and potential applications for astrophysical research.

Findings

Catalog contains 380,858 sources with IRAC photometry.

80% completeness at 19.7 AB magnitude.

Data useful for studying extragalactic objects, AGN, stars, and infrared background.

Abstract

We present a photometric catalog for Spitzer Space Telescope warm mission observations of the North Ecliptic Pole (NEP; centered at $\rm R.A.=18^h00^m00^s$, $\rm Decl.=66^d33^m38^s.552$). The observations are conducted with IRAC in 3.6 $\mu$m and 4.5 $\mu$m bands over an area of 7.04 deg$^2$ reaching 1$\sigma$ depths of 1.29 $\mu$Jy and 0.79 $\mu$Jy in the 3.6 $\mu$m and 4.5 $\mu$m bands respectively. The photometric catalog contains 380,858 sources with 3.6 $\mu$m and 4.5 $\mu$m band photometry over the full-depth NEP mosaic. Point source completeness simulations show that the catalog is 80% complete down to 19.7 AB. The accompanying catalog can be utilized in constraining the physical properties of extra-galactic objects, studying the AGN population, measuring the infrared colors of stellar objects, and studying the extra-galactic infrared background light.