PRIMUS

From NYU CCPP Wiki

1 Introduction
2 Setting up to work on PRIMUS data
3 PRIMUS software documentation
4 PRIMUS observing
5 PRIMUS mask run list
6 Funding information
7 Which one is the "real" PRIMUS?

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Introduction

PRIMUS survey official website

The PRIMUS spectral element: a large, high throughput, triple prism.

PRIMUS is a project to measure enormous numbers of galaxy redshifts per hour on the IMACS instrument on the Baade 6.5m telescope at Magellan, using a prism rather than a grating or grism as the spectral element. The hope is to take of order 15,000 spectra per night, at redshifts of order unity. Because of the low-dispersion, the redshifts are low precision: we hope to do somewhat better than a percent in redshift, with very few catastrophic outliers.

Our scientific goals for this pilot project are focused on understanding galaxy evolution in the past eight billion years. However, the instrument has much broader applicability, including studying quasars, getting accurate distances to clusters, calibrating photometric redshifts for weak-lensing and large scale structure, etc. If the technique works, we can plan extremely large redshift surveys in the near future (think SDSS at redshift unity) that will start to address cosmological questions.

We began work on calibrating fields in Spring 2006, and to date have around 300,000 spectra. We are in the midst of processing that data and validating the general approach.

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Setting up to work on PRIMUS data

To work on preparing for PRIMUS, you need to check out the primus repository from CVS (see the CVS tutorial):

cvs -d user@howdy.physics.nyu.edu:/usr/local/cvsroot co primus

where "user" is your username at NYU.

You also need to add some environmental variable settings to your dotfiles:

export PRIMUS_DIR=$HOME/primus
export PRIMUS_DATA=/global/data/primus
export PRIMUS_RAWDATA=$PRIMUS_DATA/rawdata
export PRIMUS_REDUX=$PRIMUS_DATA/redux
export COSMOS_DATA=/global/data/cosmos

where PRIMUS_DIR should be the directory where you have checked out the primus respository and PRIMUS_DATA is where the PRIMUS data will actually live (the above location is correct for NYU). COSMOS_DATA is where the full COSMOS data release is held (you only need this if you want to go to the full images and catalogs).

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