galaxy cluster

About the Deep Lens Survey

The Deep Lens Survey is a 20 deg2 ultra-deep multi-band sky survey. The images were taken over about 100 nights on NOAO's Blanco and Mayall 4-meter telescopes. Publicly available data products include deep images, catalogs, and transient events.

The main science goal is weak gravitational lensing, in which subtle correlations of the shapes of distant galaxies reveal the intervening mass distribution. We use the multiwavelength photometry to derive photometric redshifts (approximate distances) to the galaxies. Because distance corresponds to lookback time, the combination of these two techniques unveils the growth of massive structures over cosmic time.

At the same time, this rich dataset is useful for many other purposes. We encourage you to explore it. Please acknowledge the Deep Lens Survey (citing the overview paper) and NOAO when using the data for a publication.

Funding for the Deep Lens Survey has been provided by Lucent Technologies Bell Labs, UC Davis, and NSF grants AST 0441072 and AST 0134753. Analysis algorithm development has been funded partially by NSF grant AST 1108893 and the TABASGO Foundation. Observations were obtained at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and Kitt Peak National Observatory. CTIO and KPNO are divisions of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.