First Data Release of the All-sky NOAO Source Catalog

TL;DR

The paper presents the creation of the NOAO Source Catalog, a comprehensive, well-calibrated astronomical catalog covering most of the sky with billions of objects, enabling diverse astrophysical research.

Contribution

This work provides the first large-scale, publicly accessible, multi-band astronomical catalog from NOAO data, covering 30,000 square degrees with high precision.

Findings

Contains over 2.9 billion unique objects.

Covers approximately 30,000 square degrees of the sky.

Achieves ~1-2% photometric precision and ~7 mas astrometric accuracy.

Abstract

Most of the sky has been imaged with NOAO's telescopes from both hemispheres. While the large majority of these data were obtained for PI-led projects and almost all of the images are publicly available, only a small fraction have been released to the community via well-calibrated and easily accessible catalogs. We are remedying this by creating a catalog of sources from most of the public data taken on the CTIO-4m+DECam and the KPNO-4m+Mosaic3. This catalog, called the NOAO Source Catalog (NSC), contains over 2.9 billion unique objects, 34 billion individual source measurements, covers ~30,000 square degrees of the sky, has depths of ~23rd magnitude in most broadband filters with ~1-2% photometric precision, and astrometric accuracy of ~7 mas. In addition, ~2 billion objects and ~21,000 square degrees of sky have photometry in three or more bands. The NSC will be useful for exploring stellar streams, dwarf satellite galaxies, QSOs, high-proper motion stars, variable stars and other transients. The NSC catalog is publicly available via the NOAO Data Lab service.