Untitled
Abstract
The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys are a combination of three public projects\n(the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey, the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey, and the\nMayall z-band Legacy Survey) that will jointly image ~14,000 square degrees of\nthe extragalactic sky visible from the northern hemisphere in three optical\nbands (g, r, and z) using telescopes at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and\nthe Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The combined survey footprint is\nsplit into two contiguous areas by the Galactic plane. The optical imaging is\nconducted using a unique strategy of dynamic observing that results in a survey\nof nearly uniform depth. In addition to calibrated images, the project is\ndelivering an inference-based catalog which includes photometry from the grz\noptical bands and from four mid-infrared bands (at 3.4um, 4.6um, 12um and 22um)\nobserved by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite during its\nfull operational lifetime. The project plans two public data releases each\nyear. All the software used to generate the catalogs is also released with the\ndata. This paper provides an overview of the Legacy Surveys project.