The Dark Energy Survey Data Release 2

Abstract

We present the second public data release of the Dark Energy Survey, DES DR2, based on optical/near-infrared imaging by the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the 4 m Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. DES DR2 consists of reduced single-epoch and coadded images, a source catalog derived from coadded images, and associated data products assembled from 6 yr of DES science operations. This release includes data from the DES wide-area survey covering similar to 5000 deg(2) of the southern Galactic cap in five broad photometric bands, grizY. DES DR2 has a median delivered point-spread function FWHM of g = 1.11 '', r = 0.95 '', i = 0.88 '', z = 0.83 '', and Y = 0.'' 90, photometric uniformity with a standard deviation of < 3 mmag with respect to Gaia DR2 G band, a photometric accuracy of similar to 11 mmag, and a median internal astrometric precision of similar to 27 mas. The median coadded catalog depth for a 1.'' 95 diameter aperture at signal-to-noise ratio = 10 is g = 24.7, r = 24.4, i = 23.8, z = 23.1, and Y = 21.7 mag. DES DR2 includes similar to 691 million distinct astronomical objects detected in 10,169 coadded image tiles of size 0.534 deg(2) produced from 76,217 single-epoch images. After a basic quality selection, benchmark galaxy and stellar samples contain 543 million and 145 million objects, respectively. These data are accessible through several interfaces, including interactive image visualization tools, web-based query clients, image cutout servers, and Jupyter notebooks. DES DR2 constitutes the largest photometric data set to date at the achieved depth and photometric precision. Show more