Paper detail

Detection, size, measurement and structural analysis limits for the 2MASS, UKIDSS-LAS & VISTA VIKING surveys

The 2MASS, UKIDSS-LAS and VISTA VIKING surveys have all now observed the GAMA 9hr region in the $K_s$ band. Here we compare the detection rates, photometry, basic size measurements, and single-component GALFIT structural measurements for a sample of 37,591 galaxies. We explore the sensitivity limits where the data agree for a variety of issues including: detection, star-galaxy separation, photometric measurements, size and ellipticity measurements, and Sérsic measurements. We find that 2MASS fails to detect at least 20% of the galaxy population within all magnitude bins, however for those that are detected we find photometry is robust ($\pm$ 0.2 mag) to 14.7 AB mag and star-galaxy separation to 14.8 AB mag. For UKIDSS-LAS we find incompleteness starts to enter at a flux limit of 18.9 AB mag, star-galaxy separation is robust to 16.3 AB mag and structural measurements are robust to 17.7 AB mag. VISTA VIKING data is complete to approximately 20.0 AB mag and structural measurements appear robust to 18.8 AB mag.