The Second Data Release of the INT Photometric H-Alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS DR2)

TL;DR

The IPHAS DR2 provides a comprehensive, calibrated optical photometric catalogue of 219 million sources in the Northern Galactic Plane, enabling detailed stellar population and emission-line object studies.

Contribution

This paper presents the first quality-controlled, globally-calibrated source catalogue from IPHAS DR2, covering a large Galactic area with high accuracy and depth.

Findings

Catalogue contains 219 million sources with high photometric accuracy.

The (r-Halpha, r-i) diagram effectively characterizes stellar populations and emission-line objects.

Calibration accuracy is within 0.03 mag (rms).

Abstract

The INT/WFC Photometric H-Alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS) is a 1800 square degrees imaging survey covering Galactic latitudes |b| < 5 deg and longitudes l = 30 to 215 deg in the r, i and H-alpha filters using the Wide Field Camera (WFC) on the 2.5-metre Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) in La Palma. We present 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) in the Vega magnitude system. We explain the data reduction and quality control procedures, describe and test the global re-calibration, and detail the construction of the new catalogue. We show that the new calibration is accurate to 0.03 mag (rms) and recommend a series of quality criteria to select the most reliable data from the catalogue. Finally, we demonstrate the ability of the catalogue's unique (r-Halpha, r-i) diagram to (1) characterise stellar populations and extinction regimes towards different Galactic sightlines and (2) select H-alpha emission-line objects. IPHAS is the first survey to offer comprehensive CCD photometry of point sources across the Galactic Plane at visible wavelengths, providing the much-needed counterpart to recent infrared surveys.