The Spitzer Spectroscopic Data Fusion - Merged Spectroscopic Redshift Catalogs in Spitzer Fields

The Spitzer Spectroscopic Data Fusion merges miscellaneous spectroscopic information available within "popular" extragalactic survey fields.

Last Updated on 20 March 2025 - https://zenodo.org/record/6368347 - https://www.mattiavaccari.net/df/specz

Based on the Spitzer Data Fusion Project - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7850783 - https://mattiavaccari.net/df

Merged Spec-Z ("specz-merged") catalogs merge miscellaneous spec-z information available within a given field. Different spec-z catalogs available within a given field are merged (using a search radius of 1.0 arcsec), and for sources with multiple spec-z measurements the most reliable one is chosen following the (largely arbitrarily) assumed order of decreasing reliability indicated below for each field. If CAT1,...,CATN spec-z catalogs are available in a given field, Z_1 from CAT1 (i.e. NED) is adopted as "best" redshift (i.e. ZBEST), if available, otherwise Z_2 from CAT_2 is adopted if available, and so on up to Z_N and CAT_N. In using ZBEST it's thus important to bear in mind that this is not necessarily actually the "best" redshift for science purposes, and in particular that the choice of NED as CAT1 is often not ideal. However, Z_1,...,Z_N are included to allow users to define the "best" redshift based on their science needs when multiple redshift estimates are available for a given source. ZFLAG specifies which catalog is providing the ZBEST value according to the CATN number below. ZCLASS is meant to provide further info about the class/quality of the spectroscopic redshift measurement, but for the time being is not populated and is simply a copy of ZFLAG. ZWHERE is an additional binary/bit flag indicating in which of the N catalogs each source was given a spec-z estimate in. ZWHERE will e.g. be 2^0=1 if a redshift if available only from CAT_1, whereas it will be 2^0+2^1=3 if a redshift is available *only* from CAT1 and CAT2,
so that a source with a redshift available from all catalogues will have ZWHERE=2^0+...+2^n.

See AAAREADME.SPECZ-MERGED within the ZIP archive for further information.