A 24 Micron Point Source Catalog of the Galactic Plane from Spitzer/MIPSGAL

TL;DR

This paper details the creation of a comprehensive 24 micron point source catalog from the MIPSGAL Galactic Plane Survey, including data processing, calibration verification, and analysis of catalog completeness and quality.

Contribution

It introduces a large, high-quality 24 micron point source catalog with detailed completeness and calibration assessments, derived from the MIPSGAL survey data.

Findings

Catalog contains over 930,000 sources with positional and photometric data.

Completeness decay cubes describe detection limits across the survey.

Calibration verification ensures data reliability.

Abstract

In this contribution, we describe the applied methods to construct a 24 micron based point source catalog derived from the image data of the MIPSGAL 24 micron Galactic Plane Survey and the corresponding data products. The high quality catalog product contains 933,818 sources, with a total of 1,353,228 in the full archive catalog. The source tables include positional and photometric informa- tion derived from the 24 micron images, source quality and confusion flags and coun- terpart photometry from matched 2MASS, GLIMPSE, and WISE point sources. Completeness decay data cubes are constructed at 1 arcminute angular resolution that describe the varying background levels over the MIPSGAL field and the ability to extract sources of a given magnitude from this background. The completeness decay cubes are included in the set of data products. We present the results of our efforts to verify the astrometric and photometric calibration of the catalog, and present several analyses of minor anomalies in these measurements to justify adopted mitigation strategies.