Arp@VST: Legacy Survey of the Arp Peculiar Galaxies with the VST
Authors
Marilena Spavone
Chiara Buttitta
Rosa Calvi
Alessandro Loni
the VST Team
Abstract
Arp@VST is a public observing programme, conducted at the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) hosted at ESO's Paranal Observatory. It aims to revisit the Arp catalogue by creating a public survey. The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies was produced by Halton Arp in 1966 and contains 338 galaxies with distorted morphologies and/or interacting systems. Given the excellent capabilities of the VST to map the galaxies' structure down to low surface brightness levels, for this project we will acquire deep, multi-band (g, r, i, Hα) images for all the Arp galaxies visible from Paranal Observatory (Declination < +10 deg). Being a public survey, the reduced data will be released via the ESO Science Archive as soon as they are processed.