The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project (HELP) collates, curates, homogenises, and creates derived data products for most of the premium multi-wavelength extragalactic data sets. This is not an easy task, as each telescope used to collect data uses different resolutions, different types of light – wavelengths – and observes different types of objects. Some are point-like sources of light, others are diffuse, that means they are spread over a whole area, like a galaxy for example. To ensure that those different sets of data can be used together, something known as multi-wavelength astronomy – the data need to be worked on quite a lot. In this paper, the authors prepare different data sets for the rest of the research community, making multi-wavelength astronomy a lot easier.
Guiding principles are transparent or “open” methodologies with care for reproducibility and identification of provenance. With this project definition paper the authors provide full access to the first data release of HELP; Data Release 1 (DR1). All the software and data presented is publicly available.
Reference: HELP: The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project, R. Shirley, K. Duncan, M.C. Campos Varillas, P.D. Hurley, K. Malek, Y. Roehlly, M.W.L. Smith, H. Aussel, T. Bakx, V. Buat, D. Burgarella, N. Christopher, S. Duivenvoorden, S. Eales, A. Efstathiou, E.A. Gonzalez Solares, M. Griffin, M. Jarvis, B. Lo Faro, L. Marchetti, I. McCheyne, A. Papadopoulos, K. Penner, E. Pons, M. Prescott, E. Rigby, H. Rottgering, A. Saxena, J. Scudder, M. Vaccari, L. Wang, S.J. Oliver