The Brightest Of Reionizing Galaxies Survey: Design and Preliminary
  Results
  We present the first results on the search for very bright (M_AB -21)
galaxies at redshift z~8 from the Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies (BoRG)
survey. BoRG is a Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 pure-parallel
survey that is obtaining images on random lines of sight at high Galactic
latitudes in four filters (F606W, F098M, F125W, F160W), with integration times
optimized to identify galaxies at z>7.5 as F098M-dropouts. We discuss here
results from a search area of approximately 130 arcmin^2 over 23 BoRG fields,
complemented by six other pure-parallel WFC3 fields with similar filters. This
new search area is more than two times wider than previous WFC3 observations at
z~8. We identify four F098M-dropout candidates with high statistical confidence
(detected at greater than 8sigma confidence in F125W). These sources are among
the brightest candidates currently known at z~8 and approximately ten times
brighter than the z=8.56 galaxy UDFy-38135539. They thus represent ideal
targets for spectroscopic followup observations and could potentially lead to a
redshift record, as our color selection includes objects up to z~9. However,
the expected contamination rate of our sample is about 30% higher than typical
searches for dropout galaxies in legacy fields, such as the GOODS and HUDF,
where deeper data and additional optical filters are available to reject
contaminants.
