THE SPITZER-IRAC/MIPS EXTRAGALACTIC SURVEY (SIMES) IN THE SOUTH ECLIPTIC POLE FIELD

We present the Spitzer-IRAC/MIPS Extragalactic survey (SIMES) in the South Ecliptic Pole field. The large area covered (7.7 deg^2), together with one of the lowest Galactic cirrus emissions in the entire sky and a very extensive coverage by Spitzer, Herschel, Akari, and GALEX, make the SIMES field ideal for extragalactic studies. The elongated geometry of the SIMES area (≈4:1), allowing for significant cosmic variance reduction, further improves the quality of statistical studies in this field. Here we present the reduction and photometric measurements of the Spitzer/IRAC data. The survey reaches depths of 1.93 and 1.75 μJy (1σ) at 3.6 and 4.5 μm, respectively. We discuss the multiwavelength IRAC-based catalog, completed with optical, mid-, and far-IR observations. We detect 341,000 sources with F_(3.6µm) ⩾3σ. Of these, 10% have an associated 24 μm counterpart, while 2.7% have an associated SPIRE source. We release the catalog through the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive. Two scientific applications of these IRAC data are presented in this paper. First, we compute integral number counts at 3.6 μm. Second, we use the [3.6]–[4.5] color index to identify galaxy clusters at z > 1.3. We select 27 clusters in the full area, a result consistent with previous studies at similar depth.