SINS survey of high-redshift galaxies

With 80 objects observed and 63 detected in at least one rest-frame optical nebular emission line, mainly H{alpha}, SINS represents the largest survey of spatially resolved gas kinematics, morphologies, and physical properties of star-forming galaxies at z~1-3. We describe the selection of the targets, the observations, and the data reduction.

We then focus on the "SINS H{alpha} sample," consisting of 62 rest-UV/optically selected sources at 1.3<z<2.6 for which we targeted primarily the H{alpha} and [NII] emission lines. Only ~30% of this sample had previous near-IR spectroscopic observations. The galaxies were drawn from various imaging surveys with different photometric criteria; as a whole, the SINS H{alpha} sample covers a reasonable representation of massive M_*_>~10^10^M_{sun}_ star-forming galaxies at z~1.5-2.5, with some bias toward bluer systems compared to pure K-selected samples due to the requirement of secure optical redshift.