The stripe 82 massive galaxy project. I. catalog construction

Abstract

The Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Catalog (s82-mgc) is the largest-volume stellar mass-limited sample of galaxies beyond z ≈ 0.1 constructed to date. Spanning 139.4 deg2, the s82-mgc includes a mass-limited sample of 41,770 galaxies with to z ≈ 0.7, sampling a volume of 0.3 Gpc3, roughly equivalent to the volume of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-I/II (SDSS-I/II) z < 0.15 main sample. The catalog is built on three pillars of survey data: the SDSS Stripe 82 Coadd photometry which reaches r-band magnitudes of ∼23.5 AB, Y JHK photometry at depths of 20th magnitude (AB) from the UK Infrared Deep Sky Survey Large Area Survey, and over 70,000 spectroscopic galaxy redshifts from the SDSS-I/II and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. We describe the catalog construction and verification, the production of 9-band matched aperture photometry, tests of existing and newly estimated photometric redshifts required to supplement spectroscopic redshifts for 55% of the sample, and geometric masking. We provide near-IR based stellar mass estimates and compare these to previous estimates. All catalog products are made publicly available. The s82-mgc not only addresses previous statistical limitations in high-mass galaxy evolution studies, but also begins tackling inherent data challenges in the coming era of wide-field imaging surveys.