Introduction to the CFHT Legacy Survey final release (CFHTLS T0007)

Abstract

The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) is a high impact scientific program which will see its final official release open to the world in 2012. That release will seal the legacy aspect of the survey which has already produced a large collection of scientific articles with topics ranging from cosmology to the Solar system. The survey core science was focused on dark energy and dark matter: the full realization of the scientific potential of the data set gathered between 2003 and 2009 with the MegaCam wide-field imager mounted at the CFHT prime focus is almost complete with the Supernovae Legacy Survey (SNLS) team preparing its third and last release (SNLS5), and the CFHTLenS team planning the release based around the cosmic shear survey later this year. While the data processing center TERAPIX offered to the CFHTLS scientific community regular releases over the course of the survey in its data acquisition phase (T0001-T0006), the final release took three years to refine in order to produce a pristine data collection photometrically calibrated at better than the percent both internally and externally over the total survey surface of 155 square degrees in all five photometric bands (u*, g’, r’, i’, z’). This final release, called T0007, benefits from the various advances in photometric calibration MegaCam has benefited through the joint effort between SNLS and CFHT to calibrate MegaCam at levels unexplored for an optical wide-field imager. T0007 stacks and catalogs produced by TERAPIX will be made available to the world at CADC while the CDS will offer a full integration of the release in its VO tools from VizieR to Aladin. The photometric redshifts have been produced to be released in phase with the survey. This proceeding is a general introduction to the survey and aims at presenting its final release in broad terms.