The IAC Stripe82 Legacy Survey: improved sky-rectified images

Abstract

The IAC Stripe 82 Legacy Survey is a new co-addition of the SDSS Stripe 82 data (Abazajian et al. 2009), especially reduced to preserve the faintest surface brightness features of this data set. The survey maps a 2.5 degree wide stripe along the Celestial Equator in the Southern Galactic Cap (-50$^{\circ}$ $<$ R.A. $<$ 60$^{\circ}$, -1.25$^{\circ}$ $<$ Dec.$<$ 1.25$^{\circ}$) with a total of 275 square degrees in all the five SDSS filters (u,g,r,i,z). The new reduction includes an additional and deeper band (rdeep), which is a combination of g, r and i bands. The average seeing of the Stripe82 dataset is around 1 arcsec. The mean surface brightness limits are $\mu_{lim}$[3$\sigma$,10$\times$10 arcsec$^{2}$] = 27.9, 29.1, 28.6, 28.1 and 26.7 mag arcsec$^{-2}$ for the u, g, r, i and z bands respectively. The significant depth of the data and the emphasis on preserving the characteristics of the background (sky + diffuse light) through a non-aggressive sky subtraction strategy make this dataset suitable for the study of the low surface brightness Universe. In this research note we present a new data release with improved sky-rectified images. This new data-set is published on the survey webpage and is publicly available for the community.