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Arxiv: The PANORAMIC Survey: Pure Parallel Wide Area Legacy Imaging with JWST/NIRCam Published: 10/2/2024 9:00:00 PM Updated: 10/2/2024 9:00:00 PM
Paper abstract: We present the PANORAMIC survey, a pure parallel extragalactic imagingprogram with NIRCam observed during JWST Cycle 1. The survey obtained ~530sq arcmin of NIRCam imaging from 1-5\mum, totaling ~192 hours of scienceintegration time. This represents the largest on-sky time investment of anyCycle 1 GO extragalactic NIRCam imaging program by nearly a factor of 2. Thesurvey includes ~432 sq arcmin of novel sky area not yet observed withJWST using at least 6 NIRCam broad-band filters, increasing the existing areacovered by similar Cycle 1 data by ~60%. 70 square arcmin was also coveredby a 7th filter (F410M). A fraction of PANORAMIC data (~200 sq arcmin) wasobtained in or around extragalactic deep-fields, enhancing their legacy value.Pure parallel observing naturally creates a wedding cake survey with both wideand ultra-deep tiers, with 5\sigma point source depths at F444W ranging from27.8-29.4 (ABmag), and with minimized cosmic variance. The 6+ filter observingsetup yields remarkably good photometric redshift performance, achievingsimilar median scatter and outlier fraction as CANDELS (\sigma_{\rmNMAD}~0.07; \eta~0.2), which enables a wealth of science acrossredshift without the need for followup or ancillary data. We overview theproposed survey, the data obtained as part of this program, and document thescience-ready data products in the first data release. PANORAMIC has deliveredwide-area and deep imaging with excellent photometric performance,demonstrating that pure parallel observations with JWST are a highly efficientobserving mode that is key to acquiring a complete picture of galaxy evolutionfrom rare bright galaxies to fainter, more abundant sources at all redshifts.