• Purpose
• Current Proposal (PDF)
• Review

The Calar Alto observatory has decided to perform a legacy survey that will use a sustantial fraction of the open time at the 3.5m telescope, addressing a wide range of scientific topics, in order to establish the observatory as a world-wide reference and increase its science performance.
The main important aspects of the survey will be that it should be performed by CAHA personel, it should provide the comunity not only with the raw but also with the scientifically use reduced version of the data, and some of the basic analysis outputs.
The survey should be unique, clearly different than any other imaging or spectroscopic survey already performed or to be performed in 4m-class telescopes. Due to that, it was considered that the most suitable instrument to perform the survey should be PMAS (PI:M.M.Roth). PMAS is an integral field spectrograph that it is currently used in a ~30% of the time at telescope, a fraction much larger than any other similar instrument in the world. Therefore, both the experience from the CAHA personal and the interest by the observatory users is considerable larger than in any other existing instruments offered at the telescope.
Due to that we have identify a possible legacy survey that uses the PPAK IFU (PI: M.Verheijen), which is still nowadays the IFU with the widest field-of-view (74"x64") in the world. This proposed survery wll be focus on the study of the gas content, stellar population and kinematics of a complete sample of ~1000 galaxies in a redshift range at z~0.02. Its main science topics to be addressed by this survey will be: (a) the SFR and chemical evolution of galaxies, (b) the dichotomy of the stellar population and the morphological evolution, (c) the gas inonization mechanisms, (d) the SFR in galaxy mergers, (e) the influence of the environment and AGNs in galaxy evolution.
Since the data will be deliver free within the community of users of CAHA telescopes first (CSIC and MPG institutes), and to all the astronomical community latter, and it will consumre a sustantial number of nights (~200 nights in 3 years), we have oppened here an open peer-review system (unique to our knowledge): Any of you can download the proposal, and send comments/corrections, criticisms, or your own alternative proposals, adding a rank (1=excelent, 2=good, 3=normal, 4=bad, 5=very bad) to it. All the reviews are wellcome, and they will be taken into account to decide if we proceed with the project and/or which aspects should be modifed.