GALEX Legacy Survey
Proposals for Prioritized Regions or Fields
The formal Guest Investigator Program for NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) has been discontinued, but the observatory continues to collect near-ultraviolet (227 nm) images for the GALEX Legacy Survey. GALEX is a Small Explorer mission, which images 1.2 degree fields with a resolution of ~5 arcsec.
Approximately 4700 deg^2 have been imaged to GALEX Legacy Survey depth (m_AB ~ 22.5, ~1500 sec exposure, December 2010). About 16,000 deg^2 are not yet imaged but can be observed safely by GALEX. The GALEX project would like to optimize the legacy value of the GALEX archive, and therefore invites the astronomy community to suggest high-priority fields or regions for inclusion in the ongoing survey.
All survey data will become publicly available as soon as it is delivered to the GALEX archive (http://archive.stsci.edu/galex); deliveries will be made approximately monthly. No funding is available through the GALEX program for data analysis Proposals to fund research based on GALEX data may be submitted through the NASA Astrophysics Data Program.
If you wish to suggest high-priority fields or areas for the GALEX Legacy Survey, please send a note of intent by 7 January 2011, and a brief (~1-2 page) justification by 1 February 2011, to galexhelp.
A proposal should not exceed 1 page (10 point font). It should include the following:
- Name and institution of proposer
- Contact information (email, phone(s))
- 1 paragraph introducing the science case
- 1 paragraph describing field(s) or area(s) to be observed
- 1 paragraph explaining why this is important for GALEX's legacy
- figures
- coordinate lists
- information on corollary data available to public
- references
A list of fields already observed to GLS depth may be downloaded from here. A list of planned observations may be obtained using the Target Observation and Archive Search Tool (TOAST , click on "CSV"). TOAST may also be used to make plots of GALEX coverage of fields, up to 20 x 20 deg (Use the "Box Search", exclude AIS and spectroscopy observations, and then click on "consult the sky plot" in the text for the "Matching Observations Table"). Not-yet-observed GI targets in the TOAST listing are already high-priority. Non-GI fields with zero observing time are generally not ranked as high priority, and proposals may be submitted to bump up those priorities.
Information on the GALEX mission and GALEX datasets may be found at
http://www.galex.caltech.edu/researcher/techdocs.html
Please send questions to galexhelp
Responsible NASA Official:
Curator: