HDUV: The Hubble Deep UV Legacy Survey

Abstract

We present the Hubble Deep UV Legacy Survey (HDUV), a 132-orbit imaging program with the WFC3/UVIS camera on board the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The HDUV extends and builds on the few previous UV imaging surveys in the two GOODS/CANDELS-Deep fields to provide deep images over a total area of ~100 arcmin2 in the two filters F275W and F336W. Our release also includes all the F275W imaging data taken by the CANDELS survey, which were aligned using a novel approach and combined with the HDUV survey data. By reaching depths of 27.5–28.0 mag (5σ in 0farcs4 apertures), these are the deepest high-resolution UV data over such a large area taken to date. Such unique UV imaging enables a wide range of science by the community. A few of the main goals of the HDUV survey are as follows: (1) to provide a complete sample of faint star-forming galaxies at z ~ 1–3; (2) to constrain the ionizing photon escape fraction from galaxies at z ~ 2–3; and (3) to track the build-up of bulges and the disappearance of clumpy disk galaxies through reliable internal stellar population properties at sub-kiloparsec resolution out to z ~ 3. The addition of the HDUV data further enhances the legacy value of the two GOODS/CANDELS-Deep fields, which now include deep 11-band HST imaging, as well as very deep ancillary data from X-ray to radio, enabling unique multi-wavelength studies. Here, we provide an overview of the survey design, describe the data reduction, and highlight a few basic analyses of the images that are available to the community as high-level science products, via the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes.