A deep i - selected multi - waveband galaxy catalogue in the COSMOS field †

In this paper we present a deep and homogeneous i-band selected multi-waveband catalogue in the COSMOS field covering an area of about 0.7⊓⊔◦. Our catalogue with a formal 50% completeness limit for point sources of i ∼ 26.7 comprises about 290 000 galaxies with information in 8 passbands. We combine publicly available u, B, V, r, i, z, and K data with proprietary imaging in H band. We discuss in detail the observations, the data reduction, and the photometric properties of the H-band data. We estimate photometric redshifts for all the galaxies in the catalogue. A comparison with 162 spectroscopic redshifts in the redshift range 0 ∼ < z ∼ < 3 shows that the achieved accuracy of the photometric redshifts is ∆z/(zspec + 1) ∼ < 0.035 with only ∼ 2% outliers. We derive absolute UV magnitudes and investigate the evolution of the luminosity function evaluated in the restframe UV (1500 Å). There is a good agreement between the LFs derived here and the LFs derived in the FORS Deep Field. We see a similar brightening of M∗ and a decrease of φ∗ with redshift. The catalogue including the photometric redshift information is made publicly available.