SMC-Last Mosaic Images

TL;DR

This paper presents detailed mosaic images of the Small Magellanic Cloud obtained with Spitzer IRAC, covering a large area with high resolution, and describes the data processing and public availability of these images.

Contribution

The paper provides the first comprehensive mosaic images of the SMC in the IRAC bands with artifact correction and background mitigation, available for the scientific community.

Findings

High-resolution mosaics covering 30 square degrees of the SMC.

Images include two epochs for variability studies.

Processed images are publicly accessible at IRSA.

Abstract

We present mosaic images of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) observed with the Spitzer IRAC 3.6 $\mu$m and 4.5 $\mu$m bands over two epochs, 2017 August 25 to 2017 September 13, and 2017 November 24 to 2018 February 12. The survey region comprises $\sim$30 square degrees covering the SMC and the Bridge to the Large Magellanic Cloud. The region is covered by 52 $\sim$1$.\!\!^\circ$1$\times$1$.\!\!^\circ$1 tiles, with each tile including images in each band for both separate and combined epochs. The mosaics are made in individual tangent projections in J2000 coordinates. The angular pixel size is 0$.\!\!^{\prime\prime}$6 with a resolution (FWHM) of $\sim$2$.\!\!^{\prime\prime}$0. We describe processing to correct or mitigate residual artifacts and remove background discontinuities. The mosaic images are publicly available at the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA).