NASIM: Revealing the low surface brightness Universe from legacy VISTA data
arXiv:2508.02780 · doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202555929
Abstract
Near-infrared imaging is a powerful technique in observational astronomy, but the bright background, primarily from the Earthś atmosphere, makes the detection of faint features particularly challenging. To recover low surface brightness (LSB) structures in such data, we present NASIM (Near-infrared Automated low Surface brightness reduction In Maneage), a fully automated and reproducible data reduction pipeline optimised for VISTA/VIRCAM observations. NASIM builds on GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) to effectively remove large-scale instrumental artefacts while preserving faint, diffuse emission. As a key science application, we focus on deep Ks-band observations of the Euclid Deep Field South (KEDFS), one of the deepest VISTA/VIRCAM datasets and a high-priority field for synergy with current and future facilities, including Euclid, JWST, LSST, Roman, Spitzer, and ALMA. With VIRCAM no longer operational, KEDFS now stands as a unique legacy dataset. We release selected tiles from the KEDFS survey and highlight science cases, including galaxy outskirts, LSB galaxies, and intracluster light, that demonstrate NASIMś ability to recover diffuse structures. A direct comparison with conventional VISTA data reduction pipelines demonstrates the advantages of NASIM in preserving diffuse emission without compromising compact source detection. All quantitative results presented in this paper are fully reproducible with Maneage (commit 4d32667).
arXiv comment14 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, 4 Appendices, Accepted in the Astronomy & Astrophysics Journal. The downloadable source (on arXiv) includes the full reproduction info in Maneage: https://maneage.org . It is also available with its Git history: https://gitlab.com/nasim-projects/pipeline (archived in SoftwareHeritage), and in Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/16152699
References in corpus (52)
- SciPy 1.0--Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python
- Array Programming with NumPy
- Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy
- Binary companions of evolved stars in APOGEE DR14: Search method and catalog of ~5,000 companions
- The UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS)
- The Optical and Near-Infrared Properties of Galaxies: I. Luminosity and Stellar Mass Functions
- K-corrections and filter transformations in the ultraviolet, optical, and near infrared
- Astrometry.net: Blind astrometric calibration of arbitrary astronomical images
- VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV): The public ESO near-IR variability survey of the Milky Way
- Modeling the Panchromatic Spectral Energy Distributions of Galaxies
- UltraVISTA: a new ultra-deep near-infrared survey in COSMOS
- Resolved stellar mass maps of galaxies. I: method and implications for global mass estimates
- Forty-Seven Milky Way-Sized, Extremely Diffuse Galaxies in the Coma Cluster
- The WFCAM Science Archive
- The K-Band Galaxy Luminosity Function
- The VISTA Deep Extragalactic Observations (VIDEO) Survey
- The VMC Survey - I. Strategy and First Data
- A Classical Morphological Analysis of Galaxies in the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G)
- The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Catalog of > 4000 Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Galaxy Clusters
- Color--Mass-to-Light Ratio Relations for Disk Galaxies
- The Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA): Design, Technical Overview and Performance
- Galaxies at the extremes: Ultra-diffuse galaxies in the Virgo Cluster
- The VISTA Science Archive
- The Munich Near--Infrared Cluster Survey (MUNICS) -- VI. The stellar masses of K-band selected field galaxies to z ~ 1.2
- The Burrell Schmidt Deep Virgo Survey: Tidal Debris, Galaxy Halos, and Diffuse Intracluster Light in the Virgo Cluster
- Beyond 31 mag/arcsec^2: the low surface brightness frontier with the largest optical telescopes
- Noise Based Detection and Segmentation of Nebulous Objects
- The VISTA ZYJHKs Photometric System: Calibration from 2MASS
- The IAC Stripe 82 Legacy Project: a wide-area survey for faint surface brightness astronomy
- Euclid. III. The NISP Instrument
- Lost but not Forgotten: Intracluster Light in Galaxy Groups and Clusters
- Intra-Cluster Light at the Frontier: Abell 2744
- Systematically Measuring Ultra Diffuse Galaxies (SMUDGes). I. Survey Description and First Results in the Coma Galaxy Cluster and Environs
- Structure of Brightest Cluster Galaxies and Intracluster Light
- Euclid preparation: XVIII. Cosmic Dawn Survey. Spitzer observations of the Euclid deep fields and calibration fields
- Systematically Measuring Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies (SMUDGes). V. The Complete SMUDGes Catalog and the Nature of Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies
- Introducing the LBT Imaging of Galactic Halos and Tidal Structures (LIGHTS) survey. A preview of the low surface brightness Universe to be unveiled by LSST
- An HI Survey of Six Local Group Analogs. II. HI properties of group galaxies
- The missing light of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field
- Convergence of Lobatto-type Runge-Kutta methods for partitioned differential-algebraic systems of index 2
- Systematically Measuring Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies (SMUDGes). III. The Southern SMUDGes Catalog
- Tracing spiral density waves in M81
- A new era of intracluster light studies with JWST
- Cosmology with AGN dust time lags -- Simulating the new VEILS survey
- Discovery and analysis of low-surface-brightness galaxies in the environment of NGC 1052
- The evolution of Ks-selected galaxies in the GOODS/CDFS deep ISAAC field
- The nature of the near-infrared interline sky background using fibre Bragg grating OH suppression
- The Mass-Dependent Clustering History of K-selected Galaxies at z < 4 in the SXDS/UDS Field
- Euclid preparation. XXX. Performance assessment of the NISP Red-Grism through spectroscopic simulations for the Wide and Deep surveys
- Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): Tracing galaxy environment using the marked correlation function
- A Cohesive Deep Drilling Field Strategy for LSST Cosmology
- Euclid: Early Release Observations -- The Intracluster Light of Abell 2390