HUBBLE TARANTULA TREASURY PROJECT: UNRAVELING TARANTULA'S WEB. I. OBSERVATIONAL OVERVIEW AND FIRST RESULTS

Abstract

The Hubble Tarantula Treasury Project (HTTP) is an ongoing panchromatic\nimaging survey of stellar populations in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large\nMagellanic Cloud that reaches into the sub-solar mass regime (< 0.5 Mo). HTTP\nutilizes the capability of HST to operate the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS)\nand the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in parallel to study this remarkable region\nin the near-ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared spectral regions, including\nnarrow band H$\\alpha$ images. The combination of all these bands provides a\nunique multi-band view. The resulting maps of the stellar content of the\nTarantula Nebula within its main body provide the basis for investigations of\nstar formation in an environment resembling the extreme conditions found in\nstarburst galaxies and in the early Universe. Access to detailed properties of\nindividual stars allows us to begin to reconstruct the evolution of the stellar\nskeleton of the Tarantula Nebula over space and time with parcsec-scale\nresolution. In this first paper we describe the observing strategy, the\nphotometric techniques, and the upcoming data products from this survey and\npresent preliminary results obtained from the analysis of the initial set of\nnear-infrared observations.\n