The Dragonfly Wide Field Survey. I. Telescope, Survey Design, and Data Characterization

We present a description of the Dragonfly Wide Field Survey (DWFS), a deep photometric survey of a wide area of sky. The DWFS covers 330 deg² in the equatorial GAMA fields and the Stripe 82 fields in the SDSS g and r bands. It is carried out with the 48-lens Dragonfly Telephoto Array, a telescope that is optimized for the detection of low surface brightness emission. The main goal of the survey is to study the dwarf galaxy population beyond the Local Group. In this paper, we describe the survey design and show early results. We reach 1σ depths of μ _g ≈ 31 mag arcsec^-2 on arcminute scales and show that Milky Way satellites such as Sextans, Bootes, and Ursa Major should be detectable out to D ⪆ 10 Mpc. We also provide an overview of the elements and operation of the 48-lens Dragonfly telescope and a detailed description of its data reduction pipeline. The pipeline is fully automated, with individual frames subjected to a rigorous series of quality tests. The sky subtraction is performed in two stages, ensuring that emission features with spatial scales up to ∼0.°9 × 0.°6 are preserved. The DWFS provides unparalleled sensitivity to low surface brightness features on arcminute scales.