THE SECOND-GENERATION GUIDE STAR CATALOG: DESCRIPTION AND PROPERTIES

By B. Lasker, M. Lattanzi, B. McLean, B. Bucciarelli, R. Drimmel, Jorge Garcia, Gretchen Greene, F. Guglielmetti, Christopher J Hanley, G. Hawkins and 16 more. 2008

439 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Guide Star Catalog II (GSC-II) is an all-sky database of objects derived from the uncompressed Digitized Sky Surveys that the Space Telescope Science Institute has created from the Palomar and UK Schmidt survey plates and made available to the community. Like its predecessor (GSC-I), the GSC-II was primarily created to provide guide star information and observation planning support for Hubble Space Telescope. This version, however, is already employed at some of the ground-based new-technology telescopes such as GEMINI, VLT, and TNG, and will also be used to provide support for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and GAIA space missions as well as the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope, one of the major ongoing scientific projects in China. Two catalogs have already been extracted from the GSC-II database and released to the astronomical community. A magnitude-limited (RF = 18.0) version, GSC2.2, was distributed soon after its production in 2001, while the GSC2.3 release has been available for general access since 2007. The GSC2.3 catalog described in this paper contains astrometry, photometry, and classification for 945,592,683 objects down to the magnitude limit of the plates. Positions are tied to the International Celestial Reference System; for stellar sources, the all-sky average absolute error per coordinate ranges from 0.″2 to 0.″28 depending on magnitude. When dealing with extended objects, astrometric errors are 20% worse in the case of galaxies and approximately a factor of 2 worse for blended images. Stellar photometry is determined to 0.13–0.22 mag as a function of magnitude and photographic passbands (RF, BJ, IN). Outside of the galactic plane, stellar classification is reliable to at least 90% confidence for magnitudes brighter than RF = 19.5, and the catalog is complete to RF = 20.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/137559637e0443e3f82cc88ea3567c7ff89a6555

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Citations in the corpus

X-ray–optical classification of cluster mergers and the evolution of the cluster merger fraction (2011, methodology): “2m images of less than 0.5 arcsec after processing with WCSTOOLS (Mink 2006), less than 0.2 arcsec for the SDSS (Pier et al. 2003), and less than 0.4 arcsec for the DSS images used (Lasker et al. 2008).”
The first data release (DR1) of the LAMOST regular survey (2015, methodology): “Guide stars were selected from the Guide Star Catalog (GSC), Version 2.3 (Lasker et al. 2008).”
THE SPITZER DEEP, WIDE-FIELD SURVEY (2009, background): “= −324 ± 1 mas yr−1 (Lasker et al. 2008), reassuringly consistent with our proper-motion measurements (Table 6).”
The search for failed supernovae with the Large Binocular Telescope: first candidates (2014, methodology): “The astrometric solution for NGC 6503 was found using the HST Guide Star Catalog 2.3 (Lasker et al. 2008).”
CATALOG OF ULTRA-DIFFUSE GALAXIES IN THE COMA CLUSTERS FROM SUBARU IMAGING DATA (2016, methodology): “The celestial coordinates were calibrated with WCSTools (Mink 2002) referring to the Guide Star Catalog 2.3 (Lasker et al. 2008).”
CANDELS: THE COSMIC ASSEMBLY NEAR-INFRARED DEEP EXTRAGALACTIC LEGACY SURVEY—THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS, IMAGING DATA PRODUCTS, AND MOSAICS (2011, methodology): “Absolute Astrometric Calibration The absolute astrometric accuracy of any HST observation is limited by the astrometric uncertainty of the primary guidestar, which for the GSC-2 is ∼ 0.”
SPACE TELESCOPE AND OPTICAL REVERBERATION MAPPING PROJECT. II. SWIFT AND HST REVERBERATION MAPPING OF THE ACCRETION DISK OF NGC 5548 (2015, positive): “…using up to 42 http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/proposals/tech appd/swiftta v11 /node42.html 43 http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ftools/ 35 isolated field stars drawn from the HST GSC 2.3.2 (Lasker et al. 2008) and Tycho-2 (Høg et al. 2000) catalogs, yielding residual offsets that were typically ∼0.3 arcsec.”
The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) (2012, neutral): “3 catalog (Lasker et al. 2008).”
Unwrapping ADMM: Efficient Distributed Computing via Transpose Reduction (2015, methodology): “We study the behavior of transpose reduction and consensus methods using the Second Generation Guide Star Catalog (GCS-II) (Lasker et al., 2008), an astronomical database containing 950 million stars and other astronomical objects.”
COMPREHENSIVE PHOTOMETRIC HISTORIES OF ALL KNOWN GALACTIC RECURRENT NOVAE (2009, positive): “A variety of other sources have been used to fill in my sequences, including the Tycho2 catalogue4 (Hog et al. 2000), the GSC2 catalog5 (Lasker et al. 2008), and the ASAS3 catalogue6 (Pojmanski 2001).”
Evidence for vacuum birefringence from the first optical-polarimetry measurement of the isolated neutron star RX J1856.5−3754 (2016, methodology): “We computed the FORS2 astrometry from the short exposure (60 s) science acquisition image using stars from the Guide Star Catalogue 2 (GSC-2; Lasker et al. 2008) as a reference.”