The purpose of this research is to better understand
which qualities will
uniquely distinguish true high redshift galaxies from objects
like red stars and
foreground galaxies. By using the criteria for targets
that they should
have significantly less emission at bluer wavelengths (or
be absent through a
blue filter) than in the red and that they should be very
bright through a
narrow band filter in comparison to the optical images,
15 targets were chosen.
Since the observations to confirm if the targets were high redshift galaxies
were infrared images, the reduction process included adding
single short
exposures into mosaics because the high thermal and non-thermal infrared
background would otherwise flood the CCDs and drown out the already faint
emission. The mosaics were then added together, using reduction routines
which
find median values from all of the mosaic fields to minimize background
noise,
to make final images which were bright enough to see the target object
or be
able to pick it out using further reduction routines.
The final conclusions will be that average behaviors or signature
emission
features will be associated with high redshift galaxies to
be able to better
distinguish prospective targets as high redshift galaxies
for further studies.
