The DESI Survey Validation: Results from Visual Inspection of the Quasar Survey Spectra

Understand

A key component of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey validation (SV) is a detailed visual inspection (VI) of the optical spectroscopic data to quantify key survey metrics.

• In this paper we present results from VI of the quasar survey using deep coadded SV spectra.
• We show that the majority (~70%) of the main-survey targets are spectroscopically confirmed as quasars, with ~16% galaxies, ~6% stars, and ~8% low-quality spectra lacking reliable features.
• A non-negligible fraction of the quasars are misidentified by the standard spectroscopic pipeline but we show that the majority can be recovered using post-pipeline "afterburner" quasar-identification approaches.