NUV Star Catalogue from the Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope Survey. First Release

TL;DR

This paper introduces a star catalogue from the Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope survey, covering about 2400 square degrees near the Moon's north pole, with over 86,000 stars detected in ultraviolet light.

Contribution

It provides the first release of a UV star catalogue from LUT, including data processing methods and cross-identification with Tycho-2, expanding UV stellar data near the lunar pole.

Findings

Catalogue contains 86,467 stars with SNR > 5.

Magnitude limit typically 14.4 mag, extendable to 16 mag.

Survey covers 2400 deg$^2$ near lunar north pole.

Abstract

We present a star catalogue extracted from the Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope (LUT) survey program. LUT's observable sky area is a circular belt around the Moon's north pole, and the survey program covers a preferred area for about 2400 deg$^2$ which includes a region of the Galactic plane. The data is processed with an automatic pipeline which copes with stray light contamination, artificial sources, cosmic rays, flat field calibration, photometry and so on. In the first release version, the catalogue provides high confidence sources which have been cross-identified with Tycho-2 catalogue. All the sources have signal-to-noise ratio larger than 5, and the corresponding magnitude limit is typically 14.4 mag, which can be deeper as ~16 mag if the stray light contamination is in the lowest level. A total number of 86,467 stars are recorded in the catalogue. The full catalogue in electronic form is available on line.