The first Palomar Gattini-IR catalog of J-band light curves: construction and public data release

TL;DR

The paper presents the first public data release of J-band light curves from the Palomar Gattini-IR survey, covering four years and millions of sources, enabling diverse time-domain infrared astronomy studies.

Contribution

This work provides the first large-scale, publicly available catalog of infrared light curves from PGIR, including data processing, validation, and example analysis tools.

Findings

Catalog contains 286 million sources with 50 billion measurements.

Photometric accuracy is validated against 2MASS and known variables.

Provides a valuable resource comparable to optical survey datasets.

Abstract

Palomar Gattini-IR (PGIR) is a wide-field, synoptic infrared time domain survey covering $\approx 15000$\,sq.\,deg. of the \textbf{accessible} sky at $\approx 1-3$\,night cadence to a depth of $J\approx 13.0$ and $\approx 14.9$\,Vega mag in and outside the Galactic plane, respectively. Here, we present the first data release of $J$-band light curves of 2MASS sources within the survey footprint covering approximately the first four years of operations. We describe the construction of the source catalog based on 2MASS point sources, followed by exposure filtering criteria and forced PSF photometry. The catalog contains light curves of $\approx 286$\,million unique sources with 2MASS magnitudes of $J < 15.5$\,mag, with a total of $\approx 50$\,billion photometric measurements and $\approx 20$\,billion individual source detections at signal-to-noise-ratio $> 3$. We demonstrate the photometric fidelity of the catalog by i) quantifying the magnitude-dependent accuracy and uncertainty of the photometry with respect to 2MASS and ii) comparing against forced PGIR aperture photometry for known variable sources. We present simple filtering criteria for selecting reliable photometric measurements as well as example \texttt{Python} notebooks for users. This catalog is textbf{one of} the largest compilation of nightly cadence, synoptic infrared light curves to date, comparable to those in the largest optical surveys, providing a stepping stone to upcoming infrared surveys in the coming decade.