The Carnegie-Spitzer-IMACS Redshift Survey of Galaxy Evolution since z=1.5: I. Description and Methodology

Understand

We describe the Carnegie-Spitzer-IMACS (CSI) Survey, a wide-field, near-IR selected spectrophotometric redshift survey with the Inamori Magellan Areal Camera and Spectrograph (IMACS) on Magellan-Baade.

• By defining a flux-limited sample of galaxies in Spitzer 3.6micron imaging of SWIRE fields, the CSI Survey efficiently traces the stellar mass of average galaxies to z~1.5.
• This first paper provides an overview of the survey selection, observations, processing of the photometry and spectrophotometry.
• We also describe the processing of the data: new methods of fitting synthetic templates of spectral energy distributions are used to derive redshifts, stellar masses, emission line luminosities, and coarse information on recent star-formation.