The FIRST Survey Catalog 17 Dec 2017 Version (local page) Original


A catalog for the north and south Galactic caps (946,432 sources), derived from the 1993 through 2011 observations, is available as a gzip-compressed ASCII file (catalog_14dec17.bin.gz) and as a FITS binary table (first_14dec17.fits.gz). The file size is 41 MBytes compressed (156 MBytes uncompressed) for the ASCII version and 66 MBytes compressed (113 MBytes uncompressed) for the FITS version. The catalog covers a total of about 10,575 square degrees of sky (8,444 square degrees in the north Galactic cap and 2,131 square degrees in the south Galactic cap.)

NOTE: In this version of the catalog, images taken in the the new EVLA configuration have been re-reduced using shallower CLEAN thresholds in order to reduce the "CLEAN bias" in those images. Also, the EVLA images are not co-added with older VLA images to avoid problems resulting from the different frequencies and noise properties of the configurations. That leads to small gaps in the sky coverage at boundaries between the EVLA and VLA regions. As a result, the area covered by this release of the catalog is about 60 square degrees smaller than the earlier release of the catalog (13Jun05), and the total number of sources is reduced by nearly 25,000. The previous version of the catalog does have sources in the overlap regions, but their flux densities are considered unreliable due to calibration errors. The flux densities should be more accurate in this catalog, biases are smaller, and the incidence of spurious sources is also reduced.

Over most of the survey area, the detection limit is 1 mJy. A region along the equatorial strip (RA = 21.3 to 3.3 hrs, Dec = -1 to 1 deg) has a deeper detection threshold because two epochs of observation were combined. The typical detection threshold in this region is 0.75 mJy. There are approximately 4,500 sources below the 1 mJy threshold used for most previous versions of the catalog.

See the coverage maps for more details of the area covered. Both the northern and southern areas were chosen to concide the area planned to be covered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. No new data were taken for the south Galactic cap during the past observing season, so the current catalog is practically identical to the previous catalog in the south.

For this version of the catalog, most of the maps constructed from the previous round of observations (in 1999) were remade to correct a small error in the annual aberration correction (due to a Y2K error in the observation date string.) This led to numerous small changes in the positions and flux densities for sources in the area covered by the 1999 observations. The differences are generally much smaller than the uncertainties: the mean position shift is 0.032 arcsec and the mean flux change is 0.015 mJy, though in rare cases they can be larger.

The catalog is on-line and can be searched using the FIRST Search Engine. However, for large-scale investigations it will be necessary to obtain the complete catalog. This document describes the catalog format.

The catalog is sorted by right ascension and has the following format:

    RA  (2000)   Dec      W    Fpeak      Fint    Rms     Maj    Min    PA   fMaj   fMin   fPA Field Name
06 50 44.043 +31 10 00.09       1.16      0.64   0.147   0.00   0.00  42.0   4.50   3.59  42.0 06510+31143E
06 51 02.181 +31 11 13.33       1.58      2.66   0.139   4.99   3.94  91.6   7.35   6.69  91.6 06510+31143E
06 51 03.826 +31 13 03.32 W     1.02      1.42   0.137   7.63   0.00   2.4   9.35   4.34   2.4 06510+31143E
06 51 06.134 +31 19 02.00       7.29      9.64   0.145   4.09   1.82 131.3   6.77   5.70 131.3 06510+31143E
06 51 10.784 +31 11 28.80      72.36    100.79   0.141   4.18   2.49   9.8   6.83   5.95   9.8 06510+31143E
Note that this format is the same as the most recent versions of the catalog but has changed from the oldest versions.


The catalog history page describes previously released versions of the FIRST catalogs, which are still available for historical purposes. We recommend that the new catalog be used where possible for all projects.



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Richard L. White, rlw@stsci.edu
2017 Dec 17