FIRES - Faint InfraRed Extragalactic Survey
FIRES is a Public Survey on the ESO VLT. Two fields wil be imaged deep
in J, H, Ks; spending 32 hours in each passband. The fields are
choosen to have deep HST imaging:
- HDF-S WFPC2 field. One ISAAC pointing overlaps the HST-S WFPC2
- MS1054--03 field. Four ISAAC pointings will be used to cover this
mosaic of 6 WFPC2 fields. Some additional Fors imaging will be done.
The combination of very deep VLT IR imaging with HST optical imaging is unique.
The Science Goals of this survey include:
1. Abundance of very high redshift galaxies (z > 5)
2. Properties of Ly break galaxies (z= 2-4)
3. High redshift UV faint galaxies.
4. Photometric redshifts between z=0 and z=3
5. Weak lensing
6. Faint cluster population of MS1054--03
7. dusty galaxies
etc.
The depths that can be reached are approximately 26.3, 25.8, 25.5 in
Jab, Hab, and Ksab for the Hubble Deep Field South (10 sigma
detection)
For MS1054--03 the depth will be 0.75 mag brighter, since the same
integration time will be divided over 4 pointings.
People: Franx (pi), Forster Schreiber, Kuijken, Labbe, Moorwood,
Rix, Rottgering, Rudnick, van Starkenburg,
van der Werf, van Dokkum, van de Wel