Towards the second H.E.S.S. Galactic plane catalogue

TL;DR

This paper presents the development and implementation of the second H.E.S.S. Galactic Plane Catalogue, incorporating improved data processing, background modeling, and a new workflow tested on simulations for future CTA surveys.

Contribution

It introduces a new catalog production workflow for H.E.S.S. data, leveraging open tools and simulations to prepare for the upcoming CTA Galactic Plane survey.

Findings

Deeper scan of Galactic sources achieved

Improved event reconstruction and background modeling techniques

Successful application of a new catalog workflow

Abstract

The H.E.S.S. Galactic Plane Survey (HGPS), carried out between 2004 and 2013, is the most extensive survey of our Galaxy at very-high energies that covers the southern sky. Since the first HPGS catalogue release, the new observations accumulated provide a deeper scan of many Galactic sources, and a number of improvements have been made at various stages of the data processing chain, notably on events reconstruction and background modeling techniques. In parallel a new catalog production workflow has been tested and optimized on simulations done in preparation for the future Galactic Plane survey to be conducted by the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). The development of a common data format and open scientific tools for gamma-ray astronomy allowed a smooth transition from the exploratory work done on CTA simulations to its application for H.E.S.S. data analysis. These elements offered a solid ground to build the second H.E.S.S. Galactic Plane Survey catalogue (2HGPS). In the following we will focus on the description of the catalogue workflow and show few results along the way.