| Archive | List of MSX Catalogs |
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This table contains the main catalog from Version 2.3 of the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) Point Source Catalog (PSC), which supersedes the previous version (1.2) that was released in 1999, and contains 100,000 more sources than the latter. The MSX PSC main catalog used to create this Browse table contains all the sources found in the Galactic Plane survey, and the primary high-latitude regions (the IRAS gaps regions, and the Large Magellanic Cloud). Note that this HEASARC table does not contain the MSX PSC supplementary catalogs, viz. the singleton catalog, the low-reliability catalog, or the minicatalogs for 19 selected regions.
The principal objective of the astronomy experiments onboard the MSX satellite was to complete the census of the mid-infrared (4.2-25 micron or um) sky: namely, the areas missed by the IRAS mission (about 4% of the sky was not surveyed by IRAS), and the Galactic Plane (where the sensitivity of IRAS was degraded by confusion noise in regions of high source densities or of structured extended emission). The photometry is based on co-added image plates, as opposed to single-scan data, which results in improved sensitivity and hence reliability in the fluxes. Comparison with Tycho-2 positions indicates that the astrometric accuracy of the new catalog is more than 1" better than that in Version 1.2.
The infrared instrument on MSX was named SPIRIT III; it was a 35-cm clear aperture off-axis telescope with five line scanned infrared focal-plane arrays of 18.3 arcseconds square pixels, with a high sensitivity (0.1 Jy at 8.3 um). The filter characteristics of the 6 spectral bands B1, B2, A, C, D and E are summarized below, where all wavelengths are in micron (um):
Band Center FWHM Points
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B1 4.29 um 4.22 - 4.36 um
B2 4.35 4.24 - 4.45
A 8.28 6.8 - 10.8
C 12.13 11.1 - 13.2
D 14.65 13.5 - 15.9
E 21.34 18.2 - 25.1
The MSX catalog names of the sources have been defined according to International Astronomical Union (IAU) conventions with a unique identifier combined with the position of the source. In this case, the MSX PSC V2.3 sources are named using the convention MSX6C GLLL.llll+/-BB.bbbb, where MSX6C denotes that this is MSX data run using Version 6.0 of the CONVERT software, and GLLL.llll+/-BB.bbbb gives the Galactic coordinates of the source.
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