BEACON: JWST NIRCam Pure-parallel Imaging Survey. I. Survey Design and Initial Results

Abstract We introduce the Bias-free Extragalactic Analysis for Cosmic Origins with NIRCam (BEACON) survey, a JWST Cycle 2 program allocated up to 600 pure-parallel hours of observations. BEACON explores high-latitude areas of the sky with JWST/NIRCam over ∼100 independent sight lines, totaling ∼0.3 deg 2 , reaching a median F444W depth of ≈28.2 AB mag (5 σ ). Based on existing JWST observations in legacy fields, we estimate that BEACON will photometrically identify 25–150 galaxies at z > 10 and 500–1000 at z ∼ 7–10 uniquely enabled by an efficient multiple filter configuration spanning 0.9–5.0 μ m. The expected sample size of z > 10 galaxies will allow us to obtain robust number density estimates and to discriminate between different…