We present the Flagship galaxy mock, a simulated catalogue of billions of galaxies designed to support the scientific exploitation of the Euclid mission. Euclid is a medium-class mission of the European Space Agency optimised to determine the properties of dark matter and dark energy on the largest scales of the Universe. It probes structure formation over more than 10 billion years primarily from the combination of weak gravitational lensing and galaxy clustering data. The breath of Euclid's data will also foster a wide variety of scientific analyses. The Flagship simulation was developed to provide a realistic approximation to the galaxies that will be observed by Euclid and used in its scientific analyses. We ran a state-of-the-art N-body simulation with four trillion particles, producing a lightcone on the fly. From the dark matter particles, we produced a catalogue of 16 billion haloes in one octant of the sky in the lightcone up to redshift z=3. We then populated these haloes with mock galaxies using a halo occupation distribution and abundance matching approach, calibrating the free parameters of the galaxy mock against observed correlations and other basic galaxy properties. Modelled galaxy properties include luminosity and flux in several bands, redshifts, positions and velocities, spectral energy distributions, shapes and sizes, stellar masses, star formation rates, metallicities, emission line fluxes, and lensing properties. We selected a final sample of 3.4 billion galaxies with a magnitude cut of H_E<26, where we are complete. We have performed a comprehensive set of validation tests to check the similarity to observational data and theoretical models. In particular, our catalogue is able to closely reproduce the main characteristics of the weak lensing and galaxy clustering samples to be used in the mission's main cosmological analysis. (abridged)

We provide an early assessment of the imaging capabilities of the Euclid space mission to probe deeply into nearby star-forming regions and associated very young open clusters, and in particular to check to what extent it can shed light on the new-born free-floating planet population. This paper focuses on a low-reddening region observed in just one Euclid pointing where the dust and gas has been cleared out by the hot sigma Orionis star. One late-M and six known spectroscopically confirmed L-type substellar members in the sigma Orionis cluster are used as benchmarks to provide a high-purity procedure to select new candidate members with Euclid. The exquisite angular resolution and depth delivered by the Euclid instruments allow us to focus on bona-fide point sources. A cleaned sample of sigma Orionis cluster substellar members has been produced and the initial mass function (IMF) has been estimated by combining Euclid and Gaia data. Our sigma Orionis substellar IMF is consistent with a power-law distribution with no significant steepening at the planetary-mass end. No evidence of a low-mass cutoff is found down to about 4 Jupiter masses at the young age (3 Myr) of the sigma Orionis open cluster.

The Euclid Early Release Observations (ERO) showcase Euclid's capabilities in advance of its main mission by targeting 17 astronomical objects, including galaxy clusters, nearby galaxies, globular clusters, and star-forming regions. A total of 24 hours of observing time was allocated in the early months of operation, and the scientific community was engaged through an early public data release. We describe the development of the ERO pipeline to create visually compelling images while simultaneously meeting the scientific demands within months of launch by leveraging a pragmatic data-driven development strategy. The pipeline's key requirements are to preserve the image quality and to provide flux calibration and photometry for compact and extended sources. The pipeline's five pillars are removal of instrumental signatures, astrometric calibration, photometric calibration, image stacking, and the production of science-ready catalogues for both the VIS and NISP instruments. We report a point spread function (PSF) with a full width at half maximum of 0.'' 16 in the optical I-E-band and 0.'' 49 in the near-infrared (NIR) bands Y-E, J(E), and H-E. Our VIS mean absolute flux calibration is accurate to about 1%, and the accuracy is 10% for NISP due to a limited calibration set; both instruments have considerable colour terms for individual sources. The median depth is 25.3 and 23.2 AB mag with a signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of ten for galaxies, while it is 27.1 and 24.5 AB mag at an S/N of five for point sources for VIS and NISP, respectively. Euclid's ability to observe diffuse emission is exceptional due to its extended PSF nearly matching a pure diffraction halo, the best ever achieved by a wide-field high-resolution imaging telescope. Euclid offers unparalleled capabilities for exploring the low-surface brightness (LSB) Universe across all scales, providing high precision within a wide field of view (FoV), and opening a new observational window in the NIR. Median surface-brightness levels of 29.5 and 27.9, AB mag arcsec(-2) are achieved for VIS and NISP, respectively, for detecting a 10 '' x 10 '' extended feature at the 1 sigma level.

We present an analysis of Euclid observations of a 0.5 deg$^2$ field in the central region of the Fornax galaxy cluster that were acquired during the performance verification phase. With these data, we investigate the potential of Euclid for identifying GCs at 20 Mpc, and validate the search methods using artificial GCs and known GCs within the field from the literature. Our analysis of artificial GCs injected into the data shows that Euclid's data in $I_{\rm E}$ band is 80% complete at about $I_{\rm E} \sim 26.0$ mag ($M_{V\rm } \sim -5.0$ mag), and resolves GCs as small as $r_{\rm h} = 2.5$ pc. In the $I_{\rm E}$ band, we detect more than 95% of the known GCs from previous spectroscopic surveys and GC candidates of the ACS Fornax Cluster Survey, of which more than 80% are resolved. We identify more than 5000 new GC candidates within the field of view down to $I_{\rm E}$ mag, about 1.5 mag fainter than the typical GC luminosity function turn-over magnitude, and investigate their spatial distribution within the intracluster field. We then focus on the GC candidates around dwarf galaxies and investigate their numbers, stacked luminosity distribution and stacked radial distribution. While the overall GC properties are consistent with those in the literature, an interesting over-representation of relatively bright candidates is found within a small number of relatively GC-rich dwarf galaxies. Our work confirms the capabilities of Euclid data in detecting GCs and separating them from foreground and background contaminants at a distance of 20 Mpc, particularly for low-GC count systems such as dwarf galaxies.

Extragalactic globular clusters (EGCs) are an abundant and powerful tracer of galaxy dynamics and formation, and their own formation and evolution is also a matter of extensive debate. The compact nature of globular clusters means that they are hard to spatially resolve and thus study outside the Local Group. In this work we have examined how well EGCs will be detectable in images from the Euclid telescope, using both simulated pre-launch images and the first early-release observations of the Fornax galaxy cluster. The Euclid Wide Survey will provide high-spatial resolution VIS imaging in the broad IE band as well as near-infrared photometry (YE, JE, and HE). We estimate that the galaxies within 100 Mpc in the footprint of the Euclid survey host around 830 000 EGCs of which about 350 000 are within the survey's detection limits. For about half of these EGCs, three infrared colours will be available as well. For any galaxy within 50Mpc the brighter half of its GC luminosity function will be detectable by the Euclid Wide Survey. The detectability of EGCs is mainly driven by the residual surface brightness of their host galaxy. We find that an automated machine-learning EGC-classification method based on real Euclid data of the Fornax galaxy cluster provides an efficient method to generate high purity and high completeness GC candidate catalogues. We confirm that EGCs are spatially resolved compared to pure point sources in VIS images of Fornax. Our analysis of both simulated and first on-sky data show that Euclid will increase the number of GCs accessible with high-resolution imaging substantially compared to previous surveys, and will permit the study of GCs in the outskirts of their hosts. Euclid is unique in enabling systematic studies of EGCs in a spatially unbiased and homogeneous manner and is primed to improve our understanding of many understudied aspects of GC astrophysics.

Euclid is poised to make significant advances in the study of nearby galaxies in the local Universe. Here we present a first look at 6 galaxies observed for the Nearby Galaxy Showcase as part of the Euclid Early Release Observations acquired between August and November, 2023. These targets, 3 dwarf galaxies (HolmbergII, IC10, NGC6822) and 3 spirals (IC342, NGC2403, NGC6744), range in distance from about 0.5 Mpc to 8.8 Mpc. Our assessment of the surface brightness depths in the stacked Euclid images confirms previous estimates in 100 arcsec^2 regions of 1sigma=30.5 mag/arcsec^2 for VIS, but slightly deeper than previous estimates for NISP with 1sigma=29.2-29.4 mag/arcsec^2. By combining Euclid HE, YE, and IE into RGB images, we illustrate the large field-of-view covered by a single Reference Observing Sequence, together with exquisite detail on parsec scales in these nearby galaxies. Radial surface brightness and color profiles demonstrate galaxy colors in agreement with stellar population synthesis models. Standard stellar photometry selection techniques find approximately 1.3 million stars across the 6 galaxy fields. Euclid's resolved stellar photometry allows us to constrain the star-formation histories of these galaxies, by disentangling the distributions of young stars, as well as asymptotic giant branch and red giant branch stellar populations. We finally examine 2 galaxies individually for surrounding satellite systems. Our analysis of the ensemble of dwarf satellites around NGC6744 reveals a new galaxy, EDwC1, a nucleated dwarf spheroidal at the end of a spiral arm. Our new census of the globular clusters around NGC2403 yields 9 new star-cluster candidates, 8 of which with colors indicative of evolved stellar populations. In summary, our investigation of the 6 Showcase galaxies demonstrates that Euclid is a powerful probe of the anatomy of nearby galaxies [abridged].

We present the first analysis of the Early Release Observations (ERO) program that targets fields around two lensing clusters, Abell 2390 and Abell 2764. We use imaging data from the Visible instrument (VIS) and the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) to produce photometric catalogs for a total of $ 500\,000$ objects. The imaging data reach a typical depth of $5\ in the range 25.1--25.4 AB in the NISP bands and 27.1--27.3 AB in the VIS band. Using the Lyman-break method in combination with photometric redshifts, we searched for high-redshift galaxies. We identified $30$ Lyman-break galaxy (LBG) candidates at $z>6$ and 139 extremely red sources (ERSs), most of which likely lie at lower redshift. The VIS imaging is deeper than the NISP imaging, which means that we can routinely identify high-redshift Lyman-break galaxies at about a magnitude of 3, which reduces contamination by brown dwarf stars and low-redshift galaxies. The difficulty of spatially resolving most of these sources in 0 $ imaging means that it is difficult to distinguish between galaxies and quasars. Spectroscopic follow-up campaigns of these bright sources will help us to constrain the bright end of the ultraviolet galaxy luminosity function and the quasar luminosity function at $z>6$, and it will constrain the physical nature of these objects. Additionally, we performed a combined strong- and weak-lensing analysis of A2390, and we show that will contribute to constraining the virial mass of galaxy clusters better. We also identify optical and near-infrared counterparts of known $z>0.6$ clusters in these data. These counterparts exhibit strong-lensing features. This establishes that can characterize high-redshift clusters. Finally, we provide a glimpse of the ability of to map the intracluster light out to larger radii than current facilities, which enables us to understand the cluster assembly history better and to map the dark matter distribution. This initial dataset illustrates the diverse spectrum of legacy science that is possible with the survey.

The Euclid ERO programme targeted the Perseus cluster of galaxies, gathering deep data in the central region of the cluster over 0.7 square degree, corresponding to approximately 0.25 r_200. The data set reaches a point-source depth of IE=28.0 (YE, JE, HE = 25.3) AB magnitudes at 5 sigma with a 0.16" and 0.48" FWHM, and a surface brightness limit of 30.1 (29.2) mag per square arcsec. The exceptional depth and spatial resolution of this wide-field multi-band data enable the simultaneous detection and characterisation of both bright and low surface brightness galaxies, along with their globular cluster systems, from the optical to the NIR. This study advances beyond previous analyses of the cluster and enables a range of scientific investigations summarised here. We derive the luminosity and stellar mass functions (LF and SMF) of the Perseus cluster in the Euclid IE band, thanks to supplementary u,g,r,i,z and Halpha data from the CFHT. We adopt a catalogue of 1100 dwarf galaxies, detailed in the corresponding ERO paper. We identify all other sources in the Euclid images and obtain accurate photometric measurements using AutoProf or AstroPhot for 138 bright cluster galaxies, and SourceExtractor for half a million compact sources. Cluster membership for the bright sample is determined by calculating photometric redshifts with Phosphoros. Our LF and SMF are the deepest recorded for the Perseus cluster, highlighting the groundbreaking capabilities of the Euclid telescope. Both the LF and SMF fit a Schechter plus Gaussian model. The LF features a dip at M(IE)=-19 and a faint-end slope of alpha_S = -1.2 to -1.3. The SMF displays a low-mass-end slope of alpha_S = -1.2 to -1.35. These observed slopes are flatter than those predicted for dark matter halos in cosmological simulations, offering significant insights for models of galaxy formation and evolution.

The Euclid mission of the European Space Agency will provide weak gravitational lensing and galaxy clustering surveys that can be used to constrain the standard cosmological model and its extensions, with an opportunity to test the properties of dark matter beyond the minimal cold dark matter paradigm. We present forecasts from the combination of the Euclid weak lensing and photometric galaxy clustering data on the parameters describing four interesting and representative non-minimal dark matter models: a mixture of cold and warm dark matter relics; unstable dark matter decaying either into massless or massive relics; and dark matter undergoing feeble interactions with relativistic relics. We modelled these scenarios at the level of the non-linear matter power spectrum using emulators trained on dedicated N-body simulations. We used a mock Euclid likelihood and Monte Carlo Markov chains to fit mock data and infer error bars on dark matter parameters marginalised over other parameters. We find that the Euclid photometric probe (alone or in combination with cosmic microwave background data from the Planck satellite) will be sensitive to the effect of each of the four dark matter models considered here. The improvement will be particularly spectacular for decaying and interacting dark matter models. With Euclid, the bounds on some dark matter parameters can improve by up to two orders of magnitude compared to current limits. We discuss the dependence of predicted uncertainties on different assumptions: the inclusion of photometric galaxy clustering data, the minimum angular scale taken into account, and modelling of baryonic feedback effects. We conclude that the Euclid mission will be able to measure quantities related to the dark sector of particle physics with unprecedented sensitivity. This will provide important information for model building in high-energy physics. Any hint of a deviation from the minimal cold dark matter paradigm would have profound implications for cosmology and particle physics.

The Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) on board the satellite provides multiband photometry and $R slitless grism spectroscopy in the 950--2020\,nm wavelength range. In this reference article, we illuminate the background of NISP's functional and calibration requirements, describe the instrument's integral components, and provide all its key properties. We also sketch the processes needed to understand how NISP operates and is calibrated as well as its technical potentials and limitations. Links to articles providing more details and the technical background are included. The NISP's 16 H2RG detectors with a plate scale of $ deliver a field of view of 0.57\,deg$^2$. In photometric mode, NISP reaches a limiting magnitude of sim \,24.5\,AB\,mag in three photometric exposures of about 100\,s in exposure time for point sources and with a S/N of five. For spectroscopy, NISP's point-source sensitivity is a SNR = 3.5 detection of an emission line with flux sim \,$2 $ integrated over two resolution elements of 13.4\ in 3times 560\,s grism exposures at 1.6\ (redshifted Halpha ). Our calibration includes on-ground and in-flight characterisation and monitoring of the pixel-based detector baseline, dark current, non-linearity, and sensitivity to guarantee a relative photometric accuracy better than 1.5 and a relative spectrophotometry better than 0.7. The wavelength calibration must be accurate to 5\ or better. The NISP is the state-of-the-art instrument in the near-infrared for all science beyond small areas available from HST and JWST -- and it represents an enormous advance from any existing instrumentation due to its combination of field size and high throughput of telescope and instrument. During six-year survey covering 14\,000\,deg$^2$ of extragalactic sky, NISP will be the backbone in determining distances of more than a billion galaxies. Its near-infrared data will become a rich reference imaging and spectroscopy data set for the coming decades.

The current standard model of cosmology successfully describes a variety of measurements, but the nature of its main ingredients, dark matter and dark energy, remains unknown. Euclid is a medium-class mission in the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) that will provide high-resolution optical imaging, as well as near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy, over about 14,000 deg^2 of extragalactic sky. In addition to accurate weak lensing and clustering measurements that probe structure formation over half of the age of the Universe, its primary probes for cosmology, these exquisite data will enable a wide range of science. This paper provides a high-level overview of the mission, summarising the survey characteristics, the various data-processing steps, and data products. We also highlight the main science objectives and expected performance.

We study the intracluster light (ICL) and intracluster globular clusters (ICGCs) in the nearby Perseus cluster of galaxies using Euclid's Early Release Observations. By modelling the isophotal and iso-density contours, we mapped the distributions and properties of the ICL and ICGCs out to radii of 200-600 kpc (up to similar to 1/3 of the virial radius, depending on the parameter) from the brightest cluster galaxy (BCG). We find that the central 500 kpc of the Perseus cluster hosts 70 000 +/- 2800 globular clusters, and 1.7 x 10(12) L-circle dot of diffuse light from the BCG+ICL in the near-infrared H-E. This accounts for 38 +/- 6% of the cluster's total stellar luminosity within this radius. The ICL and ICGCs share a coherent spatial distribution which suggests that they have a common origin or that a common potential governs their distribution. Their contours on the largest scales (>200 kpc) are not centred on the BCG's core, but are instead offset westwards by 60 kpc towards several luminous cluster galaxies. This offset is opposite to the displacement observed in the gaseous intracluster medium. The radial surface brightness profile of the BCG+ICL is best described by a double S & eacute;rsic model, with 68 +/- 4% of the H-E light contained in the extended, outer component. The transition between these components occurs at approximate to 60 kpc, beyond which the isophotes become increasingly elliptical and off-centred. Furthermore, the radial ICGC number density profile closely follows the profile of the BCG+ICL only beyond this 60 kpc radius, where we find an average of 60-80 globular clusters per 10(9) M-circle dot of diffuse stellar mass. The BCG+ICL colour becomes increasingly blue with radius, consistent with the stellar populations in the ICL having subsolar metallicities [Fe/H] similar to -0.6 to -1.0. The colour of the ICL, and the specific frequency and luminosity function of the ICGCs suggest that the ICL+ICGCs were tidally stripped from the outskirts of massive satellites with masses of a few x10(10) M-circle dot, with an increasing contribution from dwarf galaxies at large radii.

The Euclid Wide Survey (EWS) is predicted to find approximately 170 000 galaxy-galaxy strong lenses from its lifetime observation of 14 000 deg(2) of the sky. Detecting this many lenses by visual inspection with professional astronomers and citizen scientists alone is infeasible. As a result, machine learning algorithms, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have been used as an automated method of detecting strong lenses, and have proven fruitful in finding galaxy-galaxy strong lens candidates, such that the usage of CNNs in lens identification has increased. We identify the major challenge to be the automatic detection of galaxy-galaxy strong lenses while simultaneously maintaining a low false positive rate, thus producing a pure and complete sample of strong lens candidates from Euclid with a limited need for visual inspection. One aim of this research is to have a quantified starting point on the achieved purity and completeness with our current version of CNN-based detection pipelines for the VIS images of EWS. This work is vital in preparing our CNN-based detection pipelines to be able to produce a pure sample of the >100 000 strong gravitational lensing systems widely predicted for Euclid. We select all sources with VIS I-E < 23 mag from the Euclid Early Release Observation imaging of the Perseus field. We apply a range of CNN architectures to detect strong lenses in these cutouts. All our networks perform extremely well on simulated data sets and their respective validation sets. However, when applied to real Euclid imaging, the highest lens purity is just similar to 11%. Among all our networks, the false positives are typically identifiable by human volunteers as, for example, spiral galaxies, multiple sources, and artifacts, implying that improvements are still possible, perhaps via a second, more interpretable lens selection filtering stage. There is currently no alternative to human classification of CNN-selected lens candidates. Given the expected similar to 10(5) lensing systems in Euclid, this implies 10(6) objects for human classification, which while very large is not in principle intractable and not without precedent.

This paper presents the specification, design, and development of the Visible Camera (VIS) on the ESA Euclid mission. VIS is a large optical-band imager with a field of view of 0.54 deg^2 sampled at 0.1" with an array of 609 Megapixels and spatial resolution of 0.18". It will be used to survey approximately 14,000 deg^2 of extragalactic sky to measure the distortion of galaxies in the redshift range z=0.1-1.5 resulting from weak gravitational lensing, one of the two principal cosmology probes of Euclid. With photometric redshifts, the distribution of dark matter can be mapped in three dimensions, and, from how this has changed with look-back time, the nature of dark energy and theories of gravity can be constrained. The entire VIS focal plane will be transmitted to provide the largest images of the Universe from space to date, reaching m_AB>24.5 with S/N >10 in a single broad I_E~(r+i+z) band over a six year survey. The particularly challenging aspects of the instrument are the control and calibration of observational biases, which lead to stringent performance requirements and calibration regimes. With its combination of spatial resolution, calibration knowledge, depth, and area covering most of the extra-Galactic sky, VIS will also provide a legacy data set for many other fields. This paper discusses the rationale behind the VIS concept and describes the instrument design and development before reporting the pre-launch performance derived from ground calibrations and brief results from the in-orbit commissioning. VIS should reach fainter than m_AB=25 with S/N>10 for galaxies of full-width half-maximum of 0.3" in a 1.3" diameter aperture over the Wide Survey, and m_AB>26.4 for a Deep Survey that will cover more than 50 deg^2. The paper also describes how VIS works with the other Euclid components of survey, telescope, and science data processing to extract the cosmological information.

We make use of the unprecedented depth, spatial resolution, and field of view of the Euclid Early Release Observations (EROs) of the Perseus galaxy cluster to detect and characterise the dwarf galaxy population in this massive system. Using a dedicated annotation tool, the Euclid high-resolution VIS and combined VIS+Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) colour images were visually inspected and dwarf galaxy candidates were identified. Their morphologies, the presence of nuclei, and their globular cluster (GC) richness were visually assessed, complementing an automatic detection of the GC candidates. Structural and photometric parameters, including Euclid filter colours, were extracted from two-dimensional fitting. Based on this analysis, a total of 1100 dwarf candidates were found across the image; 606 of these appear to be new identifications. The majority (96%) are classified as dwarf ellipticals, 53% are nucleated, 26% are GC-rich, and 6% show disturbed morphologies. A relatively high fraction of galaxies, 8%, are categorised as ultra diffuse galaxies. The majority of the dwarfs follow the expected scaling relations of galaxies. Globally, the GC specific frequency, S-N, of the Perseus dwarf candidates is intermediate between those measured in the Virgo and Coma clusters. While the dwarf candidates with the largest GC counts are found throughout the Euclid field of view, the dwarfs located around the east-west strip, where most of the brightest cluster members are found, exhibit higher S-N values on average. The spatial distribution of the dwarfs, GCs, and intracluster light show a main iso-density and isophotal centre displaced to the west of the bright galaxy light distribution. The ERO imaging of the Perseus cluster demonstrates the unique capability of Euclid to concurrently detect and characterise large samples of dwarf galaxies, their nuclei, and their GC systems, allowing us to construct a detailed picture of the formation and evolution of galaxies over a wide range of mass scales and environments.

The instruments at the focus of the Euclid space observatory offer superb, diffraction-limited imaging over an unprecedented (from space) wide field of view of 0.57 deg^2. This exquisite image quality has the potential to produce high-precision astrometry for point sources once the undersampling of Euclid's cameras is taken into account by means of accurate, effective point spread function (ePSF) modelling. We present a complex, detailed workflow to simultaneously solve for the geometric distortion (GD) and model the undersampled ePSFs of the Euclid detectors. Our procedure was successfully developed and tested with data from the Early Release Observations (ERO) programme focused on the nearby globular cluster NGC 6397. Our final one-dimensional astrometric precision for a well-measured star just below saturation is 0.7 mas (0.007 pixel) for the Visible Instrument (VIS) and 3 mas (0.01 pixel) for the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP). Finally, we present a specific scientific application of this high-precision astrometry: the combination of Euclid and Gaia data to compute proper motions and study the internal kinematics of NGC 6397. Future work, when more data become available, will allow for a better characterisation of the ePSFs and GD corrections that are derived here, along with assessment of their temporal stability, and their dependencies on the spectral energy distribution of the sources as seen through the wide-band filters of Euclid.

The Euclid mission is expected to image millions of galaxies at high resolution, providing an extensive dataset with which to study galaxy evolution. Because galaxy morphology is both a fundamental parameter and one that is hard to determine for large samples, we investigate the application of deep learning in predicting the detailed morphologies of galaxies in Euclid using Zoobot, a convolutional neural network pretrained with 450 000 galaxies from the Galaxy Zoo project. We adapted Zoobot for use with emulated Euclid images generated based on Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS images and with labels provided by volunteers in the Galaxy Zoo: Hubble project. We experimented with different numbers of galaxies and various magnitude cuts during the training process. We demonstrate that the trained Zoobot model successfully measures detailed galaxy morphology in emulated Euclid images. It effectively predicts whether a galaxy has features and identifies and characterises various features, such as spiral arms, clumps, bars, discs, and central bulges. When compared to volunteer classifications, Zoobot achieves mean vote fraction deviations of less than 12% and an accuracy of above 91% for the confident volunteer classifications across most morphology types. However, the performance varies depending on the specific morphological class. For the global classes, such as disc or smooth galaxies, the mean deviations are less than 10%, with only 1000 training galaxies necessary to reach this performance. On the other hand, for more detailed structures and complex tasks, such as detecting and counting spiral arms or clumps, the deviations are slightly higher, of namely around 12% with 60 000 galaxies used for training. In order to enhance the performance on complex morphologies, we anticipate that a larger pool of labelled galaxies is needed, which could be obtained using crowd sourcing. We estimate that, with our model, the detailed morphology of approximately 800 million galaxies of the Euclid Wide Survey could be reliably measured and that approximately 230 million of these galaxies would display features. Finally, our findings imply that the model can be effectively adapted to new morphological labels. We demonstrate this adaptability by applying Zoobot to peculiar galaxies. In summary, our trained Zoobot CNN can readily predict morphological catalogues for Euclid images.

Euclid is a European Space Agency mission dedicated to the mapping of the dark Universe launched the 1st of July 2023. The mission will investigate the distance-redshift relationship and the evolution of cosmic structures. This is achieved by measuring shapes and redshifts of galaxies and clusters of galaxies up to 10 billion years away. Euclid makes use of two cosmological probes, in a wide survey over the full extragalactic sky: the Weak Gravitational Lensing (WL) and the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs). The WL is a method to map the dark matter and measure dark energy by measuring the apparent distortion of galaxy images by mass inhomogeneities along the line-of-sight. This probe requires extreme image quality thus constraining the optical system imaging quality and its characterization both on-ground and in-flight. The BAOs are wiggle patterns, imprinted in the clustering of galaxies, which provide a standard ruler to measure dark energy and the expansion in the Universe. The first images were released on the 7(th) of November 2023 showcasing the capabilities of the space segment. To achieve the stunning first images and the scientific objectives of the mission, the space segment (i.e. the spacecraft) underwent a thorough and extensive test campaign on-ground. These tests demonstrated the excellent image quality and the overall stability of both the payload and the spacecraft in a representative operational environment. In complement, further tests were performed during the commissioning phase, just after launch, to validate the spacecraft pointing stability.

This paper presents a search for high redshift galaxies from the Euclid Early Release Observations program "Magnifying Lens." The 1.5 deg$^2$ area covered by the twin Abell lensing cluster fields is comparable in size to the few other deep near-infrared surveys such as COSMOS, and so provides an opportunity to significantly increase known samples of rare UV-bright galaxies at $z\approx6-8$ ($M_{\rm UV}\lesssim-22$). Beyond their still uncertain role in reionisation, these UV-bright galaxies are ideal laboratories from which to study galaxy formation and constrain the bright-end of the UV luminosity function. Of the 501994 sources detected from a combined $Y_{\rm E}$, $J_{\rm E}$, and $H_{\rm E}$ NISP detection image, 168 do not have any appreciable VIS/$I_{\rm E}$ flux. These objects span a range in spectral colours, separated into two classes: 139 extremely red sources; and 29 Lyman-break galaxy candidates. Best-fit redshifts and spectral templates suggest the former is composed of both $z\gtrsim5$ dusty star-forming galaxies and $z\approx1-3$ quiescent systems. The latter is composed of more homogeneous Lyman break galaxies at $z\approx6-8$. In both cases, contamination by L- and T-type dwarfs cannot be ruled out with Euclid images alone. Additional contamination from instrumental persistence is investigated using a novel time series analysis. This work lays the foundation for future searches within the Euclid Deep Fields, where thousands more $z\gtrsim6$ Lyman break systems and extremely red sources will be identified.

The Cosmic Dawn Survey (DAWN survey) provides multiwavelength (UV/optical to mid-IR) data across the combined 59 deg^2 of the Euclid Deep and Auxiliary fields (EDFs and EAFs). Here, the first public data release (DR1) from the DAWN survey is presented. DR1 catalogues are made available for a subset of the full DAWN survey that consists of two Euclid Deep fields: Euclid Deep Field North (EDF-N) and Euclid Deep Field Fornax (EDF-F). The DAWN survey DR1 catalogues do not include Euclid data as they are not yet public for these fields. Nonetheless, each field has been covered by the ongoing Hawaii Twenty Square Degree Survey (H20), which includes imaging from CFHT MegaCam in the new u filter and from Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) in the griz filters. Each field is further covered by Spitzer/IRAC 3.6-4.5μm imaging spanning 10 deg^2 and reaching ∼25 mag AB (5σ). All present H20 imaging and all publicly available imaging from the aforementioned facilities are combined with the deep Spitzer/IRAC data to create source catalogues spanning a total area of 16.87 deg^2 in EDF-N and 2.85 deg^2 in EDF-F for this first release. Photometry is measured using The Farmer, a well-validated model-based photometry code. Photometric redshifts and stellar masses are computed using two independent codes for modeling spectral energy distributions: EAZY and LePhare. Photometric redshifts show good agreement with spectroscopic redshifts (σ_ NMAD∼ 0.5, η < 8% at i < 25). Number counts, photometric redshifts, and stellar masses are further validated in comparison to the COSMOS2020 catalogue. The DAWN survey DR1 catalogues are designed to be of immediate use in these two EDFs and will be continuously updated. Future data releases will provide catalogues of all EDFs and EAFs and include Euclid data.