The LVM began survey operations in November 2023, and is scheduled to continue collecting data through September 2027. For a comprehensive overview of the LVM survey strategy and survey footprint, see the LVM Targeting and Observing Strategy page.
The LVM survey footprint has been split into individual tiles, where each tile has a unique location in the sky and tile ID (tileid). Some tiles, for example in the LMC and SMC, are observed multiple times using a 9-point dither pattern. Other tiles, for example in the Milky Way plane, are only observed once. Each observation with LVM has a unique exposure number (expnum).
Data Release 20 (DR20) contains 169 LVM tiles, with a total of ~300,000 spectra across a broad sample of targets. This includes six representative targets spanning three Milky Way HII regions at different distances, a Galactic planetary nebula, and two nearby galaxies. An overview of all targets in DR20 is given on the LVM Targeting and Observing Strategy page.
Each individual LVM science observation is processed through the LVM Data Reduction Pipeline, which produces a file containing the calibrated row-stacked spectra (RSS).
It is then also processed through the LVM Data Analysis Pipeline, which is designed to extract the physical properties of the ionized gas and stellar components from the reduced spectra. The pipeline follows a multi-stage procedure that combines both parametric and non-parametric approaches to characterize the stellar continuum and the emission line properties.
Details on accessing the data resulting from both the DRP and DAP are available on our LVM Data Access page. This data can be interactively explored in our data exploration tool LVMvis.
We also provide LVM tutorials showing how to interact with LVM data, and caveats/known issues are summarized on the LVM caveats page.