Data Release 8
The UDS DR8 was released in October 2010. These data represent a major improvement over the previous UDS release (DR5), with more than double the total exposure time. The median depths are given below (AB, 5σ), estimated from the rms between 2-arcsec apertures placed in source free regions.
| J | H | K | |
| DR5 | 24.0 | 23.7 | 23.9 |
| DR8 | 24.9 | 24.2 | 24.6 |
Seeing and depth maps
Maps showing the variations in depth and seeing are provided below:
| J | H | K | |
| Depth maps | text,plot | text,plot | text,plot |
| Seeing maps | text,plot | text,plot | text,plot |
Image Correction
In addition to the usual quality control and optimisation, the DR8 images were corrected to remove a systematic striping effect in the image background. Bright sources create an artificial depression in the background which extends in perpendicular directions within detector sub-quadrants. These problems were corrected using an optimised median filter applied to the final (source-subtracted) image stacks. Further details will be provided shortly, and in the forthcoming UDS data paper (Almaini et al. in prep.). If you wish to revert the images back to their uncorrected state, simply add the following correction images to the relevant data.
J
correction map
H
correction map
K
correction map
Catalogue Extraction
Catalogues were extracted using Sextractor, with detection from the K-band image. The Sextractor parameter file can be found here. The spurious fraction was estimated by comparing the real catalogue with an equivalent extracted from an inverted image, excluding areas that are typically masked-out for science. To the depths quoted above, the spurious fraction was found to be ~0.5%.