The Online Digitized Sky Surveys (DSS1 & 2) server at the ESO/ST-ECF Archive provides access to the CD-ROM set produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute through its Guide Star Survey group. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital form with the permission of these institutions. The photographic plates were scanned to a pixel scale of about 1.7 arcseconds per pixel for the POSS, SERC, and Palomar Quick-V surveys, and to about 1.0 arcseconds per pixel for the POSS-II surveys. Images of any part of the sky may be extracted from the DSS, in either FITS or GIF format.
The RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) is a spectroscopic survey of the Milky Way which already collected over 400000 spectra of ~330000 different stars. We use the subsample of spectra with spectroscopically determined values of stellar parameters to determine the distances to these stars. The list currently contains 235064 high quality spectra which show no peculiarities and belong to 210872 different stars. The numbers will grow as the RAVE survey progresses. The distances are determined with a method based on the work by Breddels et al. (2010, Cat. J/A+A/511/A90). Here we assume that the star undergoes a standard stellar evolution and that its spectrum shows no peculiarities. The refinements include: the use of either of the three isochrone sets, a better account of the stellar ages and masses, use of more realistic errors of stellar parameter values, and application to a larger dataset. The derived distances of both dwarfs and giants match within ~21% to the astrometric distances of Hipparcos stars and to the distances of observed members of open and globular clusters. Multiple observations of a fraction of RAVE stars show that repeatability of the derived distances is even better, with half of the objects showing a distance scatter of <=11%. RAVE dwarfs are ~300pc from the Sun, and giants are at distances of 1 to 2kpc, and up to 10kpc. This places the RAVE dataset between the more local Geneva-Copenhagen survey and the more distant and fainter SDSS sample. As such it is ideal to address some of the fundamental questions of Galactic structure and evolution in the pre-Gaia era. Individual applications are left to separate papers, here we show that the full 6-dimensional information on position and velocity is accurate enough to discuss the vertical structure and kinematic properties of the thin and thick disks.
We present the final distance measurements for the 2MASS Tully-Fisher (2MTF) survey. The final 2MTF catalogue contains 2062 nearby spiral galaxies in the CMB frame velocity range of 600<cz<10000km/s with a mean velocity of 4805km/s. The main update in this release is the replacement of some archival HI data with newer ALFALFA data. Using the 2MTF template relation, we calculate the distances and peculiar velocities of all 2MTF galaxies. The mean uncertainties of the linear distance measurements are around 22 per cent in all three infrared bands. 2MTF measurements agree well with the distances from the Cosmicflows-3 compilation, which contains 1117 common galaxies, including 28 with SNIa distance measurements. Using distances estimated from the '3-bands combined' 2MTF sample and a {chi}^2^ minimization method, we find best-fitting bulk flow amplitudes of 308+/-26km/s, 318+/-29km/s, and 286+/-25km/s at depths of R_I_=20, 30 and 40h^-1^Mpc, respectively, which is consistent with the {LAMNDA}CDM model and with previous 2MTF results with different estimation techniques and a preliminary catalogue.
We infer distances and their asymmetric uncertainties for two million stars using the parallaxes published in the Gaia DR1 (GDR1) catalogue. We do this with two distance priors: A minimalist, isotropic prior assuming an exponentially decreasing space density with increasing distance, and an anisotropic prior derived from the observability of stars in a Milky Way model. We validate our results by comparing our distance estimates for 105 Cepheids which have more precise, independently estimated distances. For this sample we find that the Milky Way prior performs better (the RMS of the scaled residuals is 0.40) than the exponentially decreasing space density prior (RMS is 0.57), although for distances beyond 2kpc the Milky Way prior performs worse, with a bias in the scaled residuals of -0.36 (vs. -0.07 for the exponentially decreasing space density prior). We do not attempt to include the photometric data in GDR1 due to the lack of reliable colour information. Our distance catalogue is available at http://www.mpia.de/homes/calj/tgas_distances/main.html. These should only be used to give individual distances. Combining data or testing models should be done with the original parallaxes, and attention paid to correlated and systematic uncertainties.
For the majority of stars in the second Gaia data release, reliable distances cannot be obtained by inverting the parallax. A correct inference procedure must instead be used to account for the nonlinearity of the transformation and the asymmetry of the resulting probability distribution. Here we infer distances to almost all 1.33 billion stars with parallaxes published in the second Gaia data release. This is done using a weak distance prior that varies smoothly as a function of Galactic longitude and latitude according to a Galaxy model. The irreducible uncertainty in the distance estimate is characterized by the lower and upper bounds of an asymmetric confidence interval. Although more precise distances can be estimated for a subset of the stars using additional data (such as photometry), our goal is to provide purely geometric distance estimates, independent of assumptions about the physical properties of, or interstellar extinction towards, individual stars. We analyze the characteristics of the catalog and validate it using clusters.
Stellar distances constitute a foundational pillar of astrophysics. The publication of 1.47 billion stellar parallaxes from Gaia is a major contribution to this. Yet despite Gaia's precision, the majority of these stars are so distant or faint that their fractional parallax uncertainties are large, thereby precluding a simple inversion of parallax to provide a distance. Here we take a probabilistic approach to estimating stellar distances that uses a prior constructed from a three-dimensional model of our Galaxy. This model includes interstellar extinction and Gaia's variable magnitude limit. We infer two types of distance. The rst, geometric, uses the parallax together with a direction-dependent prior on distance. The second, photogeometric, additionally uses the colour and apparent magnitude of a star, by exploiting the fact that stars of a given colour have a restricted range of probable absolute magnitudes (plus extinction). Tests on simulated data and external validations show that the photogeometric estimates generally have higher accuracy and precision for stars with poor parallaxes. We provide a catalogue of 1.47 billion geometric and 1.35 billion photogeometric distances together with asymmetric uncertainty measures. Our estimates are quantiles of a posterior probability distribution, so they transform invariably and can therefore also be used directly in the distance modulus (5log10r-5). The catalogue may be downloaded or queried using ADQL at various sites (see http://www.mpia.de/~calj/gedr3 distances.html) where it can also be cross-matched with the Gaia catalogue.
We have identified 84 small, high-density groups of galaxies out to z~0.2 in a region of 2000deg^2^ around the north Galactic pole using the digitized Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. The groups have at least four galaxies satisfying more stringent criteria than those used by Hickson in his pioneering work in 1982: the adopted limiting surface brightness for each group is brighter (24mag/arcsec^2^ instead of 26mag/arcsec^2^), and the spread in magnitude among the member galaxies is narrower (2mag instead of 3). We also adopt a slightly modified version of the isolation criterion used by Hickson, in order to avoid rejecting groups with projected nearby faint background galaxies. A 10% contamination rate due to projection effects is expected for this sample based on extensive simulations.
We have compiled a sample of 234 ultra-steep-spectrum (USS) selected radio sources in order to find high-redshift radio galaxies. The sample covers the declination range -40{deg}<{delta}<-30{deg} in the overlap region between the 1400-MHz National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) Very Large Array (VLA) Sky Survey (NVSS), 408-MHz Revised Molonglo Reference Catalogue and the 843-MHz Sydney University Molonglo Sky Survey (the MRCR-SUMSS sample). This is the second in a series of papers on the MRCR-SUMSS sample, and here we present the K-band (2.2{mu}m) imaging of 173 of the sources primarily from the Magellan and the Anglo-Australian Telescopes. We detect a counterpart to the radio source in 93 per cent of the new K-band images which, along with previously published data, makes this the largest published sample of K-band counterparts to USS-selected radio galaxies. The location of the K-band identification has been compared to the features of the radio emission for the double sources. We find that the identification is most likely to lie near the mid-point of the radio lobes rather than closer to the brighter lobe, making the centroid a less likely place to find the optical counterpart. 79 per cent of the identifications are less than 1arcsec from the radio lobe axis. These results differ from studies of low-redshift radio samples where the environments are typically not nearly so dense and disturbed as those at high redshift. In contrast to some literature samples, we find that the majority of our sample shows no alignment between the near-infrared and radio axes. Several different morphologies of aligned structures are found and those that are aligned within 10{deg} are consistent with jet-induced star formation. The distribution and median value of the K-band magnitudes for the MRCR-SUMSS sample are found to be similar to several other USS-selected samples even though each sample has a very different median 1400MHz flux density. USS selection from a lower radio-frequency sample has not netted fainter K-band magnitudes, which may imply that the k-correction is not responsible for the effectiveness of USS selection.
30 Doradus (a.k.a. the Tarantula Nebula), with its ionizing cluster R136, is one of the few known starbursts in the Local Group. For size (~200 pc in diameter) and density of OB stars, 30 Doradus parallels the regions of intense star formation observed in the starburst knots found in the interacting galaxies in the Local Universe and the young galaxies at high redshift (z>5).
HTTP is a panchromatic imaging survey of stellar populations in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud that reaches into the sub-solar mass regime. HTTP utilizes the capability of the Hubble Space Telescope to operate the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 in parallel to study this remarkable region in the near-ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared spectral regions, including narrow-band Hα images. The high sensitivity, spatial resolution and broadband coverage of HTTP allow us to dissect the stellar populations and infer an accurate description of the anatomy of the Tarantula Nebula, and therefore to reconstruct for the first time the temporal and spatial evolution of a prototypical starburst on a sub-parsec scale.
All available catalogs are listed at http://archive.stsci.edu/vo/mast_services.html.
This is a DRAFT multicolour catalogue resulting from the multi- passband ESO Imaging Survey (EIS, see J/A+A/379/740) in the direction of the Chandra Deep Field South (CDF-S), located at RA=03h32m, Dec=-27{deg}48'. The observations were conducted at the ESO/MPG 2.2 m telescope at La Silla using the 8kx8k Wide-Field Imager (WFI).
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