The Spitzer Legacy Survey of the Cygnus-X Region: First Data Delivery

We describe the first data delivery from the Spitzer Legacy Survey of the Cygnus-X region, which is a massive star formation complex containing the richest known concentration of massive protostars and the largest OB associations in the nearest 2 kpc. This unbiased survey of 24 square degrees in Cygnus-X with the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) and the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS) instruments has the sensitivity to detect young stars to a limit of 0.5 Mȯ. The data release consists of a source catalog and mosaics of the images in each band that combine all of the frames obtained in the various observation epochs. The source catalog contains the band-merged Spitzer 3.6, 4.5, 5.8, 8.0, and 24 μm photometry as well as the 2MASS J, H, and Ks bands. A preliminary source classification using this data set has yielded over 2000 deeply embedded and Class I Young Stellar Object (YSO) candidates, and over 12000 Class II candidate objects. Our reduction pipelines use artifact-correction methods which improve the quality of the full mosaics. The Cygnus-X survey is an important part of the Spitzer legacy in the study of star formation, and has provided a data set that will be key in future investigations carried out with the warm Spitzer, Herschel, and James Webb Space Telescope missions, as well as ground-based observations.