THE SPITZER SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE DEEP FIELD: SURVEY DESIGN AND INFRARED ARRAY CAMERA CATALOGS

The Spitzer South Pole Telescope Deep Field (SSDF) is a wide-area survey using Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) to cover 94 deg(2) of extragalactic sky, making it the largest IRAC survey completed to date outside the Milky Way midplane. The SSDF is centered at (alpha, delta) = (23:30, -55:00), in a region that combines observations spanning a broad wavelength range from numerous facilities. These include millimeter imaging from the South Pole Telescope, far-infrared observations from Herschel/SPIRE, X-ray observations from the XMM XXL survey, near-infrared observations from the VISTA Hemisphere Survey, and radio-wavelength imaging from the Australia Telescope Compact Array, in a panchromatic project designed to address major outstanding questions surrounding galaxy clusters and the baryon budget. Here we describe the Spitzer/IRAC observations of the SSDF, including the survey design, observations, processing, source extraction, and publicly available data products. In particular, we present two band-merged catalogs, one for each of the two warm IRAC selection bands. They contain roughly 5.5 and 3.7 million distinct sources, the vast majority of which are galaxies, down to the SSDF 5 sigma sensitivity limits of 19.0 and 18.2 Vega mag (7.0 and 9.4 mu Jy) at 3.6 and 4.5 mu m, respectively.