On-sky characterisation of the VISTA NB118 narrow-band filters at 1.19 micron

Abstract

Observations of the high redshift Universe through narrow-band filters have proven very successful in the last decade. The 4-meter VISTA telescope, equipped with the wide-field camera VIRCAM, offers a major step forward in wide-field near-infrared imaging, and in order to utilise VISTA's large field-of-view and sensitivity, the Dark Cosmology Centre provided a set of 16 narrow-band filters for VIRCAM. These NB118 filters are centered at a wavelength near 1.19 micron in a region with few airglow emission lines. The filters allow the detection of Halpha emitters at z = 0.8, Hbeta and [OIII] emitters at z ~ 1.4, [OII] emitters at z = 2.2, and Ly-alpha emitters at z = 8.8. Based on guaranteed time observations of the COSMOS field we here present a detailed description and characterization of the filters and their performance. In particular we provide sky-brightness levels and depths for each of the 16 detector/filter sets and find that some of the filters show signs of some red-leak. We identify a sample of 2 x 10^3 candidate emission-line objects in the data. Cross-correlating this sample with a large set of galaxies with known spectroscopic redshifts we determine the "in situ" passbands of the filters and find that they are shifted by about 3.5-4 nm (corresponding to 30% of the filter width) to the red compared to the expectation based on the laboratory measurements. Finally, we present an algorithm to mask out persistence in VIRCAM data. Scientific results extracted from the data will be presented separately.

Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics

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• COSMOS-Web: stellar mass assembly in relation to dark matter halos across $0.2<z<12$ of cosmic history
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• Spectroscopic observation of Ly$\alpha$ emitters at z~7.7 and implications on re-ionization
• Near Infrared Variability of obscured and unobscured X-ray selected AGN in the COSMOS field
• A 10 deg${}^2$ Lyman-$\alpha$ survey at z=8.8 with spectroscopic follow-up: strong constraints on the LF and implications for other surveys
• A panoramic VISTA of the stellar halo of NGC 253
• Chasing Lyman alpha-emitting galaxies at z = 8.8
• Deep rest-frame far-UV spectroscopy of the giant Lyman-alpha emitter 'Himiko'
• Merging Galaxies with Tidal Tails in COSMOS to z=1
• The NIR structure of the barred galaxy NGC253 from VISTA
• Tracing the galaxy-halo connection with galaxy clustering in COSMOS-Web from z = 0.1 to z ~ 12
• Emission line selected galaxies at $z=0.6-2$ in GOODS South: Stellar masses, SFRs, and large scale structure
• A Method to improve line flux and redshift measurements with narrowband filters
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