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CALIFA, the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey:
II. First public data release

B. Husemann, K. Jahnke, S. F. Sánchez, D. Barrado y Navascues, S. Bekeraitè, D. J. Bomans, A. Castillo-Morales, C. Catalán-Torrecilla, R. Cid Fernandes, J. Falcón-Barroso, R. García-Benito, R. M. González Delgado, J. Iglésias-Páramo, B. D. Johnson, D. Kupko, R. López-Fernández, M. Lyubenova, R. A. Marino, D. Mast, A. Miskolczi, A. Monreal Ibero, A. Gil de Paz, I. Pérez, F. F. Rosales-Ortega, T. Ruiz-Lara, U. Schilling, G. van de Ven, C. J. Walcher, J. Alves, A. L. de Amorim, N. Backsmann, J. K. Barrera-Ballesteros, J. Bland-Hawthorn, R.-J. Dettmar, M. Demleitner, A. I. Díaz, H. Enke, E. Florido, H. Flores, L. Galbany, A. Gallazzi, B. García-Lorenzo, J. M. Gomes, N. Gruel, T. Haines, L. Holmes, B. Jungwiert, V. Kalinova, C. Kehrig, R. C Kennicutt, J. Klar, M. D. Lehnert, Á. R. López-Sánchez, A. de Lorenzo-Cáceres, E. Mármol-Queraltó, I. Márquez, J. Méndez-Abreu, M. Mollá, A. del Olmo, S. Meidt, P. Papaderos, J. Puschnig, A. Quirrenbach, M. M. Roth, P. Sánchez-Blázquez, K. Spekkens, R. Singh, V. Stanishev, S. C. Trager, J. M. Vílchez, V. Wild, L. Wisotzki, S. Zibetti, B. Ziegler

Abstract
We present the first public data release (DR1) of the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) survey. It consists of sciencegrade optical datacubes for the first 100 of eventually 600 nearby (0:005 < z < 0:03) galaxies, obtained with the integral-field spectrograph PMAS/PPak mounted on the 3.5m telescope at the Calar Alto observatory. The galaxies in DR1 already cover a wide range of properties in color-magnitude space, morphological type, stellar mass, and gas ionization conditions. This offers the potential to tackle a variety of open questions in galaxy evolution using spatially resolved spectroscopy. Two different spectral setups are available for each galaxy, (i) a low-resolution V500 setup covering the nominal wavelength range 3745–7500Å with a spectral resolution of 6.0Å (FWHM), and (ii) a medium-resolution V1200 setup covering the nominal wavelength range 3650–4840Å with a spectral resolution of 2.3Å (FWHM). We present the characteristics and data structure of the CALIFA datasets that should be taken into account for scientific exploitation of the data, in particular the effects of vignetting, bad pixels and spatially correlated noise. The data quality test for all 100 galaxies showed that we reach a median limiting continuum sensitivity of 1.0 ⨯ 10-18 erg s-1 cm-2 Å-1 arcsec-2 at 5635Å and 2:2⨯10-18 erg s-1 cm-2 Å-1 arcsec-2 at 4500Å for the V500 and V1200 setup respectively, which corresponds to limiting r and g band surface brightnesses of 23.6 mag arcsec-2 and 23:4 mag arcsec-2, or an unresolved emission-line flux detection limit of roughly 1 ⨯ 10-17 erg s-1 cm-2 arcsec-2 and 0:6 ⨯ 10-17 erg s-1 cm-2 arcsec-2, respectively. The median spatial resolution is 3".7, and the absolute spectrophotometric calibration is better than 15% (1σ). We also describe the available interfaces and tools that allow easy access to this first public CALIFA data at http://califa.caha.es/DR1.

Keywords
techniques: spectroscopic – Galaxy: general – surveys

Notes
Based on observations collected at the Centro Astronómico Hispano Alemán (CAHA) at Calar Alto, operated jointly by the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (MPIA) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC)

Astronomy & Astrophysics
Volume 549, Number of pages A87_1
2013 January

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Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa Universidade do Porto Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia COMPETE 2020 PORTUGAL 2020 União Europeia