Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) is a wide-field imaging camera on the prime focus of the 8.2-m Subaru telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. A team of scientists from Japan, Taiwan, and Princeton University is using HSC to carry out a 300-night multi-band imaging survey of the high-latitude sky. The survey includes three layers: the Wide layer will cover 1400 deg² in five broad bands (grizy), with a 5 σ point-source depth of r ≈ 26. The Deep layer covers a total of 26 deg² in four fields, going roughly a magnitude fainter, while the UltraDeep layer goes almost a magnitude fainter still in two pointings of HSC (a total of 3.5 deg²). Here we describe the instrument, the science goals of the survey, and the survey strategy and data processing. This paper serves as an introduction to a special issue of the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, which includes a large number of technical and scientific papers describing results from the early phases of this survey.

The current standard model of cosmology successfully describes a variety of measurements, but the nature of its main ingredients, dark matter and dark energy, remains unknown. Euclid is a medium-class mission in the Cosmic Vision 2015–2025 programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) that will provide high-resolution optical imaging, as well as near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy, over about 14 000 deg² of extragalactic sky. In addition to accurate weak lensing and clustering measurements that probe structure formation over half of the age of the Universe, its primary probes for cosmology, these exquisite data will enable a wide range of science. This paper provides a high-level overview of the mission, summarising the survey characteristics, the various data-processing steps, and data products. We also highlight the main science objectives and expected performance.

The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) has become a cornerstone of extragalactic astronomy. Since the last public catalog in 2015, a wealth of new imaging and spectroscopic data have been collected in the COSMOS field. This paper describes the collection, processing, and analysis of these new imaging data to produce a new reference photometric redshift catalog. Source detection and multiwavelength photometry are performed for 1.7 million sources across the 2 deg² of the COSMOS field, ∼966,000 of which are measured with all available broadband data using both traditional aperture photometric methods and a new profile-fitting photometric extraction tool, The Farmer, which we have developed. A detailed comparison of the two resulting photometric catalogs is presented. Photometric redshifts are computed for all sources in each catalog utilizing two independent photometric redshift codes. Finally, a comparison is made between the performance of the photometric methodologies and of the redshift codes to demonstrate an exceptional degree of self-consistency in the resulting photometric redshifts. The i < 21 sources have subpercent photometric redshift accuracy and even the faintest sources at 25 < i < 27 reach a precision of 5%. Finally, these results are discussed in the context of previous, current, and future surveys in the COSMOS field. Compared to COSMOS2015, it reaches the same photometric redshift precision at almost one magnitude deeper. Both photometric catalogs and their photometric redshift solutions and physical parameters will be made available through the usual astronomical archive systems (ESO Phase 3, IPAC-IRSA, and CDS).

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least 4 m. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the 6.5 m James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 yr, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.

The Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS) is a program that uses the 1 deg² MegaCam instrument on the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope to carry out a comprehensive optical imaging survey of the Virgo cluster, from its core to its virial radius—covering a total area of 104 deg²—in the u*griz bandpasses. Thanks to a dedicated data acquisition strategy and processing pipeline, the NGVS reaches a point-source depth of g ≈ 25.9 mag (10σ) and a surface brightness limit of μ _g ∼ 29 mag arcsec⁻² (2σ above the mean sky level), thus superseding all previous optical studies of this benchmark galaxy cluster. In this paper, we give an overview of the technical aspects of the survey, such as areal coverage, field placement, choice of filters, limiting magnitudes, observing strategies, data processing and calibration pipelines, survey timeline, and data products. We also describe the primary scientific topics of the NGVS, which include: the galaxy luminosity and mass functions; the color–magnitude relation; galaxy scaling relations; compact stellar systems; galactic nuclei; the extragalactic distance scale; the large-scale environment of the cluster and its relationship to the Local Supercluster; diffuse light and the intracluster medium; galaxy interactions and evolutionary processes; and extragalactic star clusters. In addition, we describe a number of ancillary programs dealing with “foreground” and “background” science topics, including the study of high-inclination trans-Neptunian objects; the structure of the Galactic halo in the direction of the Virgo Overdensity and Sagittarius Stream; the measurement of cosmic shear, galaxy–galaxy, and cluster lensing; and the identification of distant galaxy clusters, and strong-lensing events.

We present new measurements of rest-UV luminosity functions and angular correlation functions from 4,100,221 galaxies at z ∼ 2–7 identified in the Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam survey and CFHT Large Area U-band Survey. The obtained luminosity functions at z ∼ 4–7 cover a very wide UV luminosity range of ∼ 0.002 – 2000 L UV * combined with previous studies, confirming that the dropout luminosity function is a superposition of the active galactic nucleus (AGN) luminosity function dominant at M _UV ≲ −24 mag and the galaxy luminosity function dominant at M _UV ≳ −22 mag, consistent with galaxy fractions based on 1037 spectroscopically identified sources. Galaxy luminosity functions estimated from the spectroscopic galaxy fractions show the bright-end excess beyond the Schechter function at ≳2σ levels, possibly made by inefficient mass quenching, low dust obscuration, and/or hidden AGN activity. By analyzing the correlation functions at z ∼ 2–6 with HOD models, we find a weak redshift evolution (within 0.3 dex) of the ratio of the star formation rate (SFR) to the dark matter accretion rate, SFR / M ̇ h , indicating the almost constant star formation efficiency at z ∼ 2–6, as suggested by our earlier work at z ∼ 4–7. Meanwhile, the ratio gradually increases with decreasing redshift at z < 5 within 0.3 dex, which quantitatively reproduces the cosmic SFR density evolution, suggesting that the redshift evolution is primarily driven by the increase of the halo number density due to the structure formation, and the decrease of the accretion rate due to the cosmic expansion. Extrapolating this calculation to higher redshifts assuming the constant efficiency suggests a rapid decrease of the SFR density at z > 10 with ∝ 10^−0.5(1+z), which will be directly tested with the James Webb Space Telescope.