Survey Astronomy: Highlights

VISTA is a 4-metre telescope with a 1.65o diameter field-of-view 64 Mpixel near-IR camera, being completed at ESO in Chile in 2008 as the world-leading near-IR survey telescope for many years. Emerson led the 18 UK University Consortium VISTA bid which received £24.8M JIF funding, obtained a further £12M from PPARC, and headed development since approval (overseeing £33.34M expenditure from his VISTA construction grants since 2001). Sutherland (VISTA Project Scientist) led definition of science requirements and their translation into VISTA hardware specifications and has been crucial to its success. Both will be redeeming their vast time investments since 2001 by producing and exploiting VISTA public surveys in international teams. Sutherland leads VISTA’s VIKING survey (30 co-Is), and is a member of the VLT Survey Telescope KIDS, and 3 other VISTA, survey teams. Emerson is in all 6 VISTA and the 2 other VST survey teams. ESO’s VISTA public surveys have 75% of time, opening up (inter alia): study of z>6.5 universe (>1000 galaxies), photometric redshifts for weak-lensing and baryon-oscillation studies, tracing galaxy and cluster structure/evolution out to z=4, unravelling 3-D structure and evolutionary history of the Galactic Bulge and Magellanic Clouds, and providing a southern sky survey 4 magnitudes fainter than 2MASS.

In preparation for VISTA data handling Emerson formed and led the distributed (Cambridge and Edinburgh) VISTA Data Flow System (VDFS) for producing calibrated VISTA and WFCAM (as test-bed) images/catalogues in an SQL-queryable science archive, which produced important UKIDSS data releases, and the VISTA pipeline for ESO.

Sutherland made key contributions to interpreting MACHO survey data; in the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, he led development of the redshift measurement code and made significant contributions to analysis of cosmological data