The GOODS NICMOS Survey (GNS) is a 180 orbit Hubble Space Telescope survey consisting of 60 pointings with the NICMOS-3 near-infrared camera. Each pointing is centred on a massive galaxy (M* > 10¹¹ M_sun) in the redshift range 1.7 < z < 3, selected by their optical-to-infrared colours (Papovich+06,Yan+04,Daddi+07) from the GOODS (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey) fields. GOODS is designed to compile deep observational data over two fields of about 320 arcmin² field of view and a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, ranging from Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray data, over HST ACS optical imaging to Spitzer IRAC and MIPS observations in the infrared.

The positions of the 60 GNS pointings were optimised to contain as many massive galaxies as possible and are partly overlapping, covering a total area of about 45 arcmin². The field of view of the NICMOS-3 camera is 51.2 × 51.2 arcsec with a resolution of about 0.1 arcsec/pixel. The PSF has a width of about 0.3 arcsec FWHM. The limiting magnitude in H band reached at 5σ is H_AB = 26.8, about 2 magnitudes fainter than in available ground based data of the GOODS fields.

This website presents the GNS working group at the University of Nottingham and the research that is done by its members. If you have any questions please contact conselice_at_nottingham.ac.uk