Bibcode
                                    
                            Zucker, Catherine; Yu, Zhefu; Wideman, Zachary; Xue, Yongquan; Wen, Di; Tucker, Brad E.; Trilling, David E.; Sharp, Rob; Salvato, Mara; Ricci, Claudio; Merloni, Andrea; Mangian, Amelia; Malik, Umang; Krumpe, Mirko; Li, Jennifer I.; Lidman, Chris; Koekemoer, Anton M.; Horne, Keith; Hartigan, Patrick; Hall, Patrick B.; Golovich, Nathan; Grier, Catherine J.; Graham, Melissa L.; Fu, Jianyang; Fuentes, Cesar; Fonseca Alvarez, Gloria; Dwelly, Tom; Eltvedt, Alice; De Rosa, Gisella; Drlica-Wagner, Alex; Chen, Yu-Ching; Casares, Jorge; Burke, Colin J.; Brandt, W. N.; Bielby, Richard; Bauer, Franz E.; Assef, Roberto J.; Abbott, Timothy M. C.; Anderson, Scott F.; Martini, Paul; Liu, Xin; Li, Junyao; Stone, Zachary; Gruendl, R. A.; Friedel, Douglas N.; Adamów, Monika; Shen, Yue; Yang, Qian; Zhuang, Ming-Yang
    Bibliographical reference
                                    The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series
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                        10
            
                        2024
            
  Citations
                                    4
                            Refereed citations
                                    2
                            Description
                                    High-quality Extragalactic Legacy-field Monitoring (HELM) is a long-term observing program that photometrically monitors several well-studied extragalactic legacy fields with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) imager on the CTIO 4 m Blanco telescope. Since 2019 February, HELM has been monitoring regions within COSMOS, XMM-LSS, CDF-S, S-CVZ, ELAIS-S1, and SDSS Stripe 82 with few-day cadences in the (u)gri(z) bands, over a collective sky area of ∼38 deg2. The main science goal of HELM is to provide high-quality optical light curves for a large sample of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and to build decades-long time baselines when combining past and future optical light curves in these legacy fields. These optical images and light curves will facilitate the measurements of AGN reverberation mapping lags, as well as studies of AGN variability and its dependencies on accretion properties. In addition, the time-resolved and coadded DECam photometry will enable a broad range of science applications from galaxy evolution to time-domain science. We describe the design and implementation of the program and present the first data release that includes source catalogs and the first ∼3.5 yr of light curves during 2019A–2022A.
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