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I. Dell'Antonio (Brown), J. A. Tyson, D. Wittman, A. Becker, V. Margoniner (Bell Labs, Lucent), G. Wilson (Brown), DLS Team
The Deep Lens Survey will ultimately observe seven separate 4-square-degree patches of the sky in four filters (B,V,R,z'), to a limiting (1\sigma) surface brightness of 28.7 magnitudes per square arcsecond in R, comparable depths in B and V, and ~26.5 mag per square arcsecond in z'. Because the data is intended to be used for gravitational lensing, the image quality has been carefully controlled, and the data is quite uniform throughout the fields. Although the primary science goals of the survey involve gravitational lensing, a uniform wide-field and high-quality photometric dataset like this has many applications.
Because of this, the data (both in image and catalog form) are being made available to the astronomical community at: http://dls.bell-labs.com. As with all survey projects, timely release of the data to the community is essential. In addition to the transient object detections (which are released to the community in ``real-time"), the DLS collaboration is committed to releasing images and catalogs of subfields (40 arcminute by 40 arcminute areas) six months after they have been imaged in all four filters. The first two subfields were released in August, and the next set of releases (involving roughly 10 subfields) is set for August 2002. We describe the data processing pipeline that has been applied to the released data, and the choice of cataloging parameters. In addition, we present data-quality information pertaining to the data uniformity, source counts and completeness limits, and photometric and astrometric uncertainties.