Abstract

The DECam Local Volume Exploration survey (DELVE) is a 126-night survey program on the 4 m Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. DELVE seeks to understand the characteristics of faint satellite galaxies and other resolved stellar substructures over a range of environments in the Local Volume. DELVE will combine new DECam observations with archival DECam data to cover similar to 15,000 deg(2) of high Galactic latitude (vertical bar b vertical bar > 10 degrees) southern sky to a 5 sigma depth of g, r, i, z similar to 23.5 mag. In addition, DELVE will cover a region of similar to 2200 deg(2) around the Magellanic Clouds to a depth of g, r, i similar to 24.5 mag and an area of similar to 135 deg(2) around four Magellanic analogs to a depth of g, i similar to 25.5 mag. Here, we present an overview of the DELVE program and progress to date. We also summarize the first DELVE public data release (DELVE DR1), which provides point-source and automatic aperture photometry for similar to 520 million astronomical sources covering similar to 5000 deg(2) of the southern sky to a 5 sigma point-source depth of g = 24.3 mag, r = 23.9 mag, i = 23.3 mag, and z = 22.8 mag. DELVE DR1 is publicly available via the NOIRLab Astro Data Lab science platform.