DECaPS2 is a five-band optical and near-infrared survey of the southern Galactic plane with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4.0m Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The survey is designed to reach past the main-sequence turn-off at the distance of the Galactic center through a reddening E(B-V) of 1.5 mag, with a typical single-exposure depth of 23.7, 22.7, 22.2, 21.7, and 20.9 mag in the grizY bands, and with average seeing around 1''. The footprint covers \(|b| < 10°\), \(6° > l > -124°\) (essentially the low latitude Galactic plane south of \(\delta < -24°\), a total of about 2700 square degrees (6.5% of the sky). DECaPS2 simultaneously solves for the positions and fluxes of all the sources in each image, delivering positions and fluxes of 3.32 billion stars with up to 5 mmag repeatability. Most of these objects are highly reddened and deep in the Galactic disk, probing the structure and properties of the Milky Way and its interstellar medium.

The full survey is publicly available. The full survey can be rapidly browsed and inspected on the web. Raw and processed images are available through the NOIRLab Astro Data Archive. The complete catalogs for the survey, both for individual image detections and band-merged calibrated objects, are also public and accompanied by a datamodel to increase accessibility.

Further Explore

DECaPS2 superceeds the DECaPS1 release and all DECaPS1 products are also available in this release for comparison. However, the previous documentation for DECaPS1 is retained here.