SHARDS: GOODS-N spectrophotometry survey

SHARDS is an ultra-deep optical spectro-photometric survey of the GOODS-N field covering 130arcmin2 at wavelengths between 500 and 950nm with 24 contiguous medium-band filters (providing a spectral resolution R~50). The data reach an AB magnitude of 26.5 (at least at a 3{sigma} level) with sub-arcsec seeing in all bands.

SHARDS' main goal is to obtain accurate physical properties of intermediate- and high-z galaxies using well-sampled optical spectral energy distributions (SEDs) with sufficient spectral resolution to measure absorption and emission features, whose analysis will provide reliable stellar population and active galactic nucleus (AGN) parameters. Among the different populations of high-z galaxies, SHARDS' principal targets are massive quiescent galaxies at z>1, whose existence is one of the major challenges facing current hierarchical models of galaxy formation.