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Paper: Version 1 of the Hubble Source Catalog
Volume: 512, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XXV
Page: 77
Authors: Whitmore, B.; Budavari, T.; Donaldson, T.; Downes, R. A.; Lubow, S. H.; Quick, L.; Strolger, L.-G.; Wallace, G.; White, R. L.
Abstract: The Hubble Source Catalog (HSC) is designed to help optimize science from the Hubble Space Telescope by combining the tens of thousands of visit-based Hubble Legacy Archive (HLA - available at http://hla.stsci.edu) source lists into a single master catalog. The HSC includes ACS/WFC, WFPC2, and WFC3 source lists generated using the Source Extractor software (Bertin & Arnouts 1996). The current version of the catalog includes roughly 80 million detections of 30 million objects involving 112 different detector/filter combinations and about 50 thousand HST exposures cross-matched using techniques described in Budavári & Lubow (2012). To carry out the cross matching we first improve the astrometry for the source lists using a histogram method to compare against Pan-STARRS, SDSS, and 2MASS catalogs. We then further improve the alignment using a highly efficient method for approximately aligned source lists to achieve relative offsets typically good to a few milli-arcsec (mas). A final pass versus Pan-STARRS is use to normalize to their absolute astrometry grid. The relative astrometric residuals for HSC objects are typically within 10 mas while the absolute astrometry is good to about 100 mas. The photometric magnitude residuals between repeat measurements are generally within 0.10 mag, and only a few hundredths of a mag for high signal-to-noise observations. The primary ways to access the HSC are the MAST Discovery Portal (http://mast.stsci.edu), and a CasJobs capability for advanced searches. The URL for the HSC is http://archive.stsci.edu/hst/hsc/.
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