Newsletter 1 — December 2022
Message from the PIs
Welcome everyone to the MAUVE survey and to the first MAUVE Newsletter! We look forward to working with you all in the next few years and doing great science together. Our aim is to make this experience as fun as possible for everyone. We cannot wait for the first MUSE data to start trickle in, but in the meantime we have been busy behind the scenes building the survey infrastructure, assembling the management team and getting ready to process the data. To start with, we have a brand-new public website (mauve.icrar.org), a Slack channel and a team wiki (see below). We plan on issuing newsletters every few months to keep the team updated, and starting regular science meetings in 2023. As you can read below, a lot of progress has already been made on the data reduction front. However, we are always looking for additional resources to help on various aspects of the survey, in particular creating science-ready products from the reduced MUSE cubes. If you are interested in helping, please get in touch with us! We hope that you will enjoy this newsletter, and best wishes for the end of the year, a relaxing break and exciting MAUVE science in 2023!— Barbara & Luca
MAUVE Team and Survey Management
MAUVE is an open collaboration, which can be joined at anytime by emailing the PIs (mauve-pis at maillists.uwa.edu.au). The team membership is kept updated on our public web site (Team). In the past few months we have welcomed a few new members: Stefania Barsanti (ANU), Weiguang Cui (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Giulia Santucci (ICRAR/UWA), two PhD students, Yifei Jin (ANU) and Zefeng Li (ANU), and one Master student, James McGregor (ICRAR/UWA) — welcome all to the team! To help the PIs in managing the survey, we have formed an Executive Team (also listed on the Team page) which includes the PIs, Toby Brown (PI of VERTICO), Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, Stephanie Tonnensen and Adam Watts. The exec team will also be in charge of reviewing paper proposals and keep an eye on the progress of each science project. On the data reduction side, Amelia Fraser-McKelvie & Adam Watts have been leading the efforts (see below for more details), but we are actively looking for additional resources to help in particular with the creation of value-added data products. In other words, we need you! Thank you to Toby Brown and Lodovico Coccato who already offered to help! If you would like to get involved and help with various aspects of the data reduction and/or creation of data products please get in touch with us (by emailing the PIs). On the theory side, Rory Smith and Stephanie Tonnensen are co-leading our Theory WG and have already been active in coordinating with other team members to design the best way to produce products useful for MAUVE. If you would like to contribute and/or get involved, please get in touch with Rory and Stephanie.Communication & Branding
In addition to the public web site, we have set-up team emailing lists, a Slack channel (who you all have already been invited to), and a MAUVE wiki to host useful resources and team policies. As a first step, you need an account on Data Central to access it. Please have look at the "#resources" channel on our Slack space and follow the instructions to gain access to the wiki. Admittedly, the procedure is a bit tedious, but hopefully it will be smooth for everyone. It is very important that the whole team access the Slack and wiki regularly, as these will be the main modes of interaction among teams members.
If you need to contact the full MAUVE team, the PIs or the executive team, please use the dedicated emailing lists: either "mauve-pis", "mauve-exec" or "mauve-team" at "maillists.uwa.edu.au"
Lastly, we encourage you to advertise MAUVE when you have a chance (and please let the PIs know if you do). As you see, we have a logo (huge thanks to Paula Calderón-Castillo for the artwork!) and an official mauve color (Hex code #C78DB6). You can find high-resolution material to use in presentations and other activities on the wiki under "Resources".Policies and paper proposals
We recommend all team members to familiarize themselves with our membership and publication policies available on our wiki. Also, we have set agreements for data sharing with the VESTIGE and VERTICO teams. Please, feel free to contact the PIs if you have any questions. We will issue an official call for the first round of paper proposals in early February.Observing Status
With a lot of help from the chairs of the Data Reduction WG and some expert advice from Brent Groves and Lodovico Coccato, MAUVE OBs were submitted to the ESO Phase 2 system in late August. Observations have not started yet, given the right ascension range of our targets. We expect observations to start before the end of the year, and we plan to complete 11 galaxies in P110 on top of the 3 already completed by PHANGS. Most importantly, if all goes well, we will have data for half the MAUVE survey by mid-2023! You can have a look of the current plan for the 4 ESO periods on the wiki, under "Survey status".
Data Reduction WG
The data reduction team has been hard at work setting up and testing the MUSE data reduction software. Data reduction will be carried out taking advantage of computing provided by Data Central and the plan is to use the same pipeline used by the PHANGS-MUSE survey. We have already installed the pymusepipe wrapper on our remote desktop hosted at Data Central, and have been reducing OBs from MAUVE pilot data obtained for NGC4383. Currently we are benchmarking the flux calibration against SDSS, checking the astrometric solution and alignment of the exposures from single observing blocks, and the accuracy of the sky subtraction. The alignment module used for building mosaics is currently being re-written, and we will be able to test these routines soon.— Adam & Amelia