NEXUS Early Data Release: NIRCam Imaging and WFSS Spectroscopy from the First (Partial) Wide Epoch

Abstract We present the early data release of the multicycle JWST-NEXUS treasury program (2024–2028), which includes NIRCam imaging and WFSS observations from the first (partial) NEXUS-Wide epoch covering the central 100 arcmin 2 of the NEXUS field, located near the north ecliptic pole and within the Euclid Ultra-Deep Field. We release reduced NIRCam mosaics (F090W, F115W, F150W, F200W, F356W, and F444W), photometric source catalogs, as well as preliminary WFSS spectra (in F322W2 and F444W) for the subset of bright sources (F356W <21 mag or F444W <21 mag). These observations fully cover the NEXUS-Deep area, and anchor the long-term baseline of the program. These data will be used for initial target selection for the NIRSpec/Multi-Object Spectroscopy (MOS) starting from 2025 June. The NIRCam imaging reaches depths of 27.4–28.2 (AB) mag in F090W–F444W. Upcoming NEXUS-Wide epochs will expand the area to the full ∼400 arcmin 2 , and improve the NIRCam exposure depths in the Wide tier by a factor of 3. In addition, this central region will be repeatedly covered by the NEXUS-Deep observations (NIRCam imaging and NIRSpec/MOS PRISM spectroscopy) over 18 epochs with a ∼2 month cadence. We demonstrate the data quality of the first NEXUS observations, and showcase some example science cases enabled by these data.