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Description
The INT/WFC Photometric H-Alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS) is a 1860 deg^2^ imaging survey of the Northern Milky Way at red visible wavelengths. It covers Galactic latitudes |b|<5{deg} and longitudes l=30 to 215{deg} in the broad-band r, i and narrow-band H-alpha filters using the Wide Field Camera (WFC) on the 2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) in La Palma. IPHAS Data Release 2 (DR2) is the first quality-controlled and globally calibrated source catalogue derived from the survey, providing single-epoch photometry for 219 million unique sources across 92% of the footprint. The observations were carried out between 2003 and 2012 at a median seeing of 1.1 arcsec (sampled at 0.33 arcsec/pixel) and to a mean 5-sigma depth of 21.2 (r), 20.0 (i) and 20.3 (H-alpha). The photometric calibration is in the Vega magnitude system and carries an external precision of 0.03mag (root-mean-square error). The catalogue includes all the sources which have been detected at a signal-to-noise ratio of 5 or better in at least one band. Many applications will require a combination of quality criteria to be applied to avoid faint stars or confused sources. The choice of quality criteria tensions completeness against reliability, and hence depends on the requirements of a project. To aid users, the data release paper (arXiv:1406.4862) recommends two sets of quality criteria, named "a10" and "a10point", which should satisfy most projects. As a minimum, the "a10" criteria select objects which have been detected at the minimum level of 10-sigma in all bands, without being saturated. Additional constraints are provided by the "a10point" criteria, which require objects to be point sources free of blending, unaffected by nearby bright stars, as well as being unsaturated >10-sigma detections in all bands. Sources in both categories are flagged in the catalogue using the boolean columns a10 and a10point. Imaging and auxiliary data are available from the project website (www.iphas.org).
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