This project was completed over six weeks during June and July 2017 as part of an internship funded by the Durham University Physics Department, with the supervision of Dr. Mark Swinbank.
The movies were made using images from the UKIDSS UDS survey , taken by the WFCAM on the UK Infrared Telescope. See the UDS website for more details .
The Ultra Deep Survey (UDS) is the deepest near-infrared survey ever conducted over such a large area (0.8 sq degrees). The aim is to understand how and when galaxies are formed and trace their evolution over the last 13 billion years. Over two hundred and fifty thousand galaxies have been detected so far. The PI of the UDS project is Omar Almaini (Nottingham), and the full list of Co-investigators can be found here . To create these movies, we used SExtractor (in conjunction with Python) to create a thumbnail for each galaxy in the image and to alter its colour based on its J, H and K flux. Using the right ascension (RA) and declination (Dec) coordinates and redshift data, the thumbnails were loaded into the software Partiview, which allows the user to visualise data in 3D and 'fly' through it. The Digital Universe was used to load a 3D atlas of the Milky Way, with the intention of creating a movie to demonstrate the depth and richness of galaxies which can be found in a seemingly insignificant portion of the sky. With Python, it was possible to write a camera flightpath, with a snapshot being taken for each movement of the camera. ffmpeg was used to compile the individual frames into a movie.The UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) is composed of five near-infrared surveys, one of which is the Ultra Deep Survey (UDS). The survey, which began in 2005, uses the Wide Field Camera (WFCAM) on the UK Infrared Telescope, and will survey an area of 7500 square degrees of the sky. Our focus for these movies was the UDS field, the deepest of the 5 surveys, covering an area of 0.77 square degrees to a depth of K = 23.0.
See the UDS website for more details .The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is an international collaboration which is an array of 66 radio antennae which are used as an interferometer, built at an altitude of 5000 metres in the Atacama Desert, Northern Chile. A sample of 750 sub-mm sources from the SCUBA-2 Cosmology Legacy Survey we observed with ALMA in Cycle 1, 2, 3 & 4 as part of the ALMA-SCUBA-2 UDS survey (AS2UDS). Early results from this survey are presented in Simpson et al. 2015 . The full catalog and main science results will be presented in Stach et al. 2017.
The Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) represents one of the largest observing campaigns completed by the Hubble Space Telescope, consisting of 902 orbits of observing time towards three key extra-galactic fields (UDS, COSMOS and ECDFS). Using the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), the central regions of the UDS field were observed in the optical and near-infrared.