C. Hao, Enrique Pérez, I. Márquez, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, T. Ruiz-Lara, E. Mármol-Queraltó, Vallery Stanishev, Sergio Albiol-Pérez, Sebastián F. Sánchez, Robert C. Kennicutt, C. Montijo, Benjamin D. Johnson, J. A. L. Aguerri, Jesús Falcón-Barroso, Veselina Kalinova, Vivienne Wild, Begoña García-Lorenzo, Sharon E. Meidt, Ana Monreal-Ibero, João Alves, R. A. Marino, A. del Olmo, Anna Gallazzi, José M. Vílchez, F. F. Rosales-Ortega, Angel R. Lopez-Sanchez, C. Sengupta, I. Pérez, Martin Roth, J. Masegosa, Bernd Husemann, Almudena Alonso-Herrero, M. Relaño, C. Cortijo-Ferrero, Knud Jahnke, Polychronis Papaderos, Ralf-Jürgen Dettmar, D. J. Bomans, Lutz Wisotzki, Andreas Quirrenbach, J. Bakos, Reynier Peletier, Alexandre Vazdekis, Mariya Lyubenova, J. Iglesias-Páramo, Alessandro Boselli, G. Palacios-Navarro, Bruno Jungwiert, Kerttu Viironen, Patricia Sanchez-Blazquez, Hector Flores, Nicolas Gruel, C. J. Walcher, África Castillo-Morales, R. Singh, R. M. González Delgado, Anna Pasquali, D. Kupko, T. Bartakova, A. Mourao, Jairo Méndez-Abreu, G. van de Ven, A. Gil de Paz, Stefano Zibetti, Simon Ellis, Bodo L. Ziegler, Tim Haines, Scott Trager, C. Kehrig, A. de Lorenzo-Cáceres, Angeles I. Díaz, D. Mast, and Astronomy
Acknowledgements. We thank the referee Eric Emsellem for his detailed comments which helped to improve the content and presentation of the article. We thank the director of CEFCA, Dr. M. Moles, for his sincere support to this project. We thank the Viabilidad, Diseno, Acceso y Mejora funding program, ICTS-2009-10, and the Plan Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo funding program, AYA2010-22111-C03-03, of the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion, for the support given to this project. I.M. and J.M. acknowledge financial support from the Spanish grant AYA2010-15169 and Junta de Andalucía TIC114 and Excellence Project P08-TIC-03531. C.K., as a Humboldt Fellow, acknowledges support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany. B. Jungwiert acknowledges support by the grants AV0Z10030501 (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic) and LC06014 (Center for Theoretical Astrophysics, Czech Ministry of Education). T. Bartáková acknowledges support by the grants No. 205/08/H005 (Czech Science Foundation) and MUNI/A/0968/2009 (Masaryk University in Brno). Polychronis Papaderos is supported by a Ciencia 2008 contract, funded by FCT/MCTES (Portugal) and POPH/FSE (EC). This paper makes use of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data. Funding for the SDSS and SDSS-II has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The SDSS Web Site is http://www.sdss.org/. The SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions. The Participating Institutions are the American Museum of Natural History, Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, University of Basel, University of Cambridge, Case Western Reserve University, University of Chicago, Drexel University, Fermilab, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, the Korean Scientist Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (LAMOST), Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Max-PlanckInstitute for Astronomy (MPIA), the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), New Mexico State University, Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the United States Naval Observatory, and the University of Washington., The final product of galaxy evolution through cosmic time is the population of galaxies in the local universe. These galaxies are also those that can be studied in most detail, thus providing a stringent benchmark for our understanding of galaxy evolution. Through the huge success of spectroscopic single-fiber, statistical surveys of the Local Universe in the last decade, it has become clear, however, that an authoritative observational description of galaxies will involve measuring their spatially resolved properties over their full optical extent for a statistically significant sample. We present here the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) survey, which has been designed to provide a first step in this direction. We summarize the survey goals and design, including sample selection and observational strategy. We also showcase the data taken during the first observing runs (June/July 2010) and outline the reduction pipeline, quality control schemes and general characteristics of the reduced data. This survey is obtaining spatially resolved spectroscopic information of a diameter selected sample of ~600 galaxies in the Local Universe (0.005 < z < 0.03). CALIFA has been designed to allow the building of two-dimensional maps of the following quantities: (a) stellar populations: ages and metallicities; (b) ionized gas: distribution, excitation mechanism and chemical abundances; and (c) kinematic properties: both from stellar and ionized gas components. CALIFA uses the PPAK integral field unit (IFU), with a hexagonal field-of-view of ~1.3⎕′, with a 100% covering factor by adopting a three-pointing dithering scheme. The optical wavelength range is covered from 3700 to 7000 Å, using two overlapping setups (V500 and V1200), with different resolutions: R ~ 850 and R ~ 1650, respectively. CALIFA is a legacy survey, intended for the community. The reduced data will be released, once the quality has been guaranteed. The analyzed data fulfillthe expectations of the original observing proposal, on the basis of a set of quality checks and exploratory analysis: (i) the final datacubes reach a 3σ limiting surface brightness depth of ~23.0 mag/arcsec2 for the V500 grating data (~22.8 mag/arcsec2 for V1200); (ii) about ~70% of the covered field-of-view is above this 3σ limit; (iii) the data have a blue-to-red relative flux calibration within a few percent in most of the wavelength range; (iv) the absolute flux calibration is accurate within ~8%with respect to SDSS; (v) the measured spectral resolution is ~85 km s-1 for V1200 (~150 km s-1 for V500); (vi) the estimated accuracy of the wavelength calibration is ~5 km s-1 for the V1200 data (~10 km s-1 for the V500 data); (vii) the aperture matched CALIFA and SDSS spectra are qualitatively and quantitatively similar. Finally, we show that we are able to carry out all measurements indicated above, recovering the properties of the stellar populations, the ionized gas andthe kinematics of both components. The associated maps illustrate the spatial variation of these parameters across the field, reemphasizing the redshift dependence of single aperture spectroscopic measurements. We conclude from this first look at the data that CALIFA will be an important resource for archaeological studies of galaxies in the Local Universe., CEFCA, Viabilidad, Diseno, Acceso y Mejora ICTS-2009-10, Instituto de Salud Carlos III Spanish Government AYA2010-22111-C03-03, Spanish grant AYA2010-15169, Junta de Andalucia TIC114, Excellence Project P08-TIC-03531, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Czech Academy of Sciences AV0Z10030501, Center for Theoretical Astrophysics, Czech Ministry of Education LC06014, Grant Agency of the Czech Republic 205/08/H005, Masaryk University in Brno MUNI/A/0968/2009, Ciencia 2008 contract, Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, European Commission Joint Research Centre, European Social Fund (ESF), Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, National Science Foundation (NSF), United States Department of Energy (DOE), National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA), Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (MEXT), Max Planck Society Foundation CELLEX, Higher Education Funding Council for England, Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) ST/H00243X/1 ST/J001538/1 ST/H004912/1