Subaru/HSC imaging of the area including the JWST NEP Time-Domain Field

The larger area surrounding the JWST NEP Time-Domain Field proper was imaged with Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) as part of the Hawaii EROsita Ecliptic pole Survey (HEROES; PI: G. Hasinger & E. Hu) in g, i2, z, and two narrow-band filters (NB816 and NB921). The JWST NEP Time-Domain Field centered at (RA, Dec)J2000 = (17:22:47.896, +65:49:21.54) is located near the Western edge of the overall HEROES footprint, and outside of the area that also has HEROES U and Y coverage from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).

Gunther Hasinger reported at the JNEP virtual workshop on Dec 2 2021 limiting magnitudes in the 26.5–24.5 mag range in g, i2, and z, and a median seeing in all bands of ~0.6 arcsec.

Satoshi Kikuta <kikutast@ccs.tsukuba.ac.jp> downloaded the available Subaru/HSC exposures once they became public early-2020, and created astrometrically and photometrically aligned mosaics in each of the bandpasses in March 2020, with zeropoint magnitudes set to 0.00 mag and a plate scale of 0.168 "/pix. The astrometry may still show some residuals with respect to Gaia EDR3, but likely more than suffices for object identification at other wavelengths.

The following 11,00012,000 pixel mosaics (flat FITS files) are available, each ~504 MB in size:

A preliminary, unvetted, merged g, i, z Source Extractor catalog that used a straight sum of the three broad-band mosaics above as the detection image, is available here [83 MB; ASCII_HEAD format; last updated dd. Feb 16 2022 with photometric uncertainties that appear to make sense, using GAIN = 1.0/(RMS2)]. The table header also includes the details on how this catalog was produced. The median seeing in g was found to be ~0.8", that in i and z ~0.5"–0.6". Compact sources brighter than m ~ 17, 17.5, and 17.5 mag in g, i, and z saturate. One can use SDSS or PanSTARRS photometry to recover brighter sources.

When using these data in publications, please include Satoshi Kikuta as a co-author, and cite the HEROES survey and paper(s), and include appropriate acknowledgements to the Subaru telescope and HyperSuprimCam instrument: