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Description
Version 2.3 of the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) Point Source Catalog (PSC), which supersedes the version (1.2) that was released in 1999 (Cat. V/107), contains over 100,000 more sources than the previous version. The photometry is based on co-added image plates, as opposed to single-scan data, which results in improved sensitivity and hence reliability in the fluxes. Comparison with Tycho-2 positions indicates that the astrometric accuracy of the new catalog is more than 1'' better than that in Version 1.2. In addition to the Galactic plane, Areas Missed by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), and the Large Magellanic Cloud, which were included in the previous catalog, Version 2.3 includes data from the Small Magellanic Cloud, eight nearby galaxies, and several molecular clouds and star forming regions. The infrared instrument on MSX was named SPIRIT III; it was a 35cm clear aperture off-axis telescope with five line scanned infrared focal plane arrays of 18.3arcsec square pixels, with a high sensitivity (0.1Jy at 8.3micron). The 6 bands are B1 (4.29micron, FWHM 4.22-4.36micron), B2 (4.25micron, 4.24-4.45micron), A (8.28micron, 6.8-10.8micron), C (12.13micron, 11.1-13.2micron), D (14.65micron, 13.5-15.9micron), and E (21.34micron, 18.2-25.1micron). The MSX catalog names of the sources have been defined according to International Astronomical Union (IAU) conventions with a unique identifier combined with the position of the source. In this case, the MSX PSC V2.3 sources are named using the convention MSX6C GLLL.llll+/-BB.bbbb, where MSX6C denotes that this is MSX data run using Version 6.0 of the CONVERT software, and GLLL.llll+/-BB.bbbb gives the Galactic coordinates of the source. (Names in the minicatalogs may differ slightly from those given in Kraemer et al. 2002AJ....124.2990K, 2003AJ....126.1423K) For ease of handling, the main catalog is broken into six files: five for the Galactic plane survey, plus the primary high latitude regions (the IRAS gaps and the LMC). The supplementary catalogs are the singleton catalog, the low-reliability catalog, and minicatalogs for 19 selected regions. All catalogs have the same format. However, the minicatalogs for the galaxies (except the SMC) and Orion do not have all the fields filled in because they were solely created from the images, not from the Point Source Extractor; there are no singleton files for these regions. Also, the minicatalogs may not have singleton or low-reliability counterparts if no sources met the inclusion criteria. All told, there are a total of 45 data files.
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