Abstract

We present the first major data release of the largest single key-project in area carried out in open time with the Herschel Space Observatory. The Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS) is a survey of 600 deg^2 in five photometric bands - 100, 160, 250, 350 and 500 um - with the PACS and SPIRE cameras. In this paper and a companion paper (Bourne et al. 2016) we present the survey of three fields on the celestial equator, covering a total area of 161.6 deg^2 and previously observed in the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) spectroscopic survey. This paper describes the Herschel images and catalogues of the sources detected on the SPIRE 250 um images. The 1-sigma noise for source detection, including both confusion and instrumental noise, is 7.4, 9.4 and 10.2 mJy at 250, 350 and 500 um. Our catalogue includes 120230 sources in total, with 113995, 46209 and 11011 sources detected at >4-sigma at 250, 350 and 500 um. The catalogue contains detections at >3-sigma at 100 and 160 um for 4650 and 5685 sources, and the typical noise at these wavelengths is 44 and 49 mJy. We include estimates of the completeness of the survey and of the effects of flux bias and also describe a novel method for determining the true source counts. The H-ATLAS source counts are very similar to the source counts from the deeper HerMES survey at 250 and 350 um, with a small difference at 500 um. Appendix A provides a quick start in using the released datasets, including instructions and cautions on how to use them.

Highlights

  • We describe the first major data release of the largest single key-project in area carried out in open time with the Herschel Space Observatory (Pilbratt et al 2010)

  • To investigate whether this method gave an improvement in the signal to noise over using the point spread function (PSF), we produced two sets of convolved Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS) images, one set convolved with the matched-filter and one set with the PSF

  • Using observations with Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) alone of the asteroid Vesta and Mars made with a scan speed of 60 arcsec s−1 and with the same scan angles used in parallel mode, the PACS team simulated in software the on-board averaging used in parallel mode to produce an estimate of the PSF out to a radius of 1000 arcsec

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

We describe the first major data release (hereafter the ‘Data Release 1’) of the largest single key-project in area carried out in open time with the Herschel Space Observatory (Pilbratt et al 2010). These fields have been imaged with the Galaxy Evolution Explorer in the FUV and NUV filters (GALEX; Martin et al 2005) and with the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer in the W1, W2, W3, W4 filters (WISE; Wright et al 2010) and as part of the UK Infrared Deep Sky Survey Large Area Survey (UKIDSS-LAS; Lawrence et al 2007) and the VISTA Kilo-Degree Infrared Galaxy Survey in the Z, Y, J, H, KS filters (VIKING; Edge et al 2013) and the VST Kilo-Degree Survey in the u, g, r, i filters (KIDS; de Jong et al 2013) This is the first of two papers describing the public release of the H-ATLAS data for the entire GAMA fields. Appendix B provides a list of the asteroids detected in our maps, since these are not included in the catalogues of sources provided in the data release

T H E HERSCHEL O B S E RVAT I O N S
THE SPIRE MAPS
Map making
The point spread function
The instrumental noise
The confusion noise
Filtering the maps
Making the images
The unresolved SPIRE sources
The extended SPIRE sources
PACS photometry
Overview
The method
The conditional probability distributions
The errors in the flux densities
The positional uncertainties
Completeness at 250 μm
THE SOURCE COUNTS
CORRECTIONS FOR FLUX BIAS AND COMPLETENESS
Flux bias and completeness at 250 μm
Comparison with SDP data
Comparison between PACS 100 μm and IRAS
10 THE CATALOGUE
11 SUMMARY
The SPIRE maps
The PACS images
Findings
The catalogues

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