MoLUSC: A Mock Local Universe Survey Constructor

This paper presents MoLUSC, a new method for generating mock galaxy catalogsfrom a large scale ($\approx 1000^3$ Mpc$^3$) dark matter simulation, thatrequires only modest CPU time and memory allocation. The method uses asmall-scale ($\approx 256^3$ Mpc$^3$) dark matter simulation on which the\galics semi-analytic code has been run in order to define the transformationfrom dark matter density to galaxy density transformation using a probabilistictreatment. MoLUSC is then applied to a large-scale dark matter simulation inorder to produce a realistic distribution of galaxies and their associatedspectra. This permits the fast generation of large-scale mock surveys usingrelatively low-resolution simulations. We describe various tests which havebeen conducted to validate the method, and demonstrate a first application togenerate a mock Sloan Digital Sky Survey redshift survey.Comment: submitted to Ap