The Spitzer-South Pole Telescope Deep Field: Survey Design and IRAC
  Catalogs
  The Spitzer-South Pole Telescope Deep Field (SSDF) is a wide-area survey
using Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) to cover 94 square degrees of
extragalactic sky, making it the largest IRAC survey completed to date outside
the Milky Way midplane. The SSDF is centered at 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 microJy) at
3.6 and 4.5 microns, respectively.
