The Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS) and the Brightest
  High-z Galaxies
  Massive foreground galaxy clusters magnify and distort the light of objects
behind them, permitting a view into both the extremely distant and
intrinsically faint galaxy populations. We present here the z ~ 6 - 8 candidate
high-redshift galaxies from the Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS), a
Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescope survey of 41 massive galaxy clusters
spanning an area of ~200 arcmin^2. These clusters were selected to be excellent
lenses and we find similar high-redshift sample sizes and magnitude
distributions as CLASH. We discover 321 candidate galaxies with photometric
redshifts between z ~ 6 to z ~ 8, including extremely bright objects with
H-band magnitudes of m_AB ~ 23 mag. As a sample, the observed (lensed)
magnitudes of these galaxies are among the brightest known at z> 6, comparable
to much wider, blank-field surveys. RELICS demonstrates the efficiency of using
strong gravitational lenses to produce high-redshift samples in the epoch of
reionization. These brightly observed galaxies are excellent targets for
follow-up study with current and future observatories, including the James Webb
Space Telescope.
