S-CANDELS: The Spitzer-Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extragalactic
  Survey. Survey Design, Photometry, and Deep IRAC Source Counts
  The Spitzer-Cosmic Assembly Deep Near-Infrared Extragalactic Legacy Survey
(S-CANDELS; PI G. Fazio) is a Cycle 8 Exploration Program designed to detect
galaxies at very high redshifts (z > 5). To mitigate the effects of cosmic
variance and also to take advantage of deep coextensive coverage in multiple
bands by the Hubble Space Telescope Multi-Cycle Treasury Program CANDELS,
S-CANDELS was carried out within five widely separated extragalactic fields:
the UKIDSS Ultra-Deep Survey, the Extended Chandra Deep Field South, COSMOS,
the HST Deep Field North, and the Extended Groth Strip. S-CANDELS builds upon
the existing coverage of these fields from the Spitzer Extended Deep Survey
(SEDS) by increasing the integration time from 12 hours to a total of 50 hours
but within a smaller area, 0.16 square degrees. The additional depth
significantly increases the survey completeness at faint magnitudes. This paper
describes the S-CANDELS survey design, processing, and publicly-available data
products. We present IRAC dual-band 3.6+4.5 micron catalogs reaching to a depth
of 26.5 AB mag. Deep IRAC counts for the roughly 135,000 galaxies detected by
S-CANDELS are consistent with models based on known galaxy populations. The
increase in depth beyond earlier Spitzer/IRAC surveys does not reveal a
significant additional contribution from discrete sources to the diffuse Cosmic
Infrared Background (CIB). Thus it remains true that only roughly half of the
estimated CIB flux from COBE/DIRBE is resolved.
