THE THIRD US NAVAL OBSERVATORY CCD ASTROGRAPH CATALOG (UCAC3)

By N. Zacharias, C. Finch, T. Girard, Nigel Hambly, G. L. Wycoff, M. Zacharias, D. Castillo, T. Corbin, M. Divittorio, S. Dutta and 20 more. 2004

497 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The third US Naval Observatory (USNO) CCD Astrograph Catalog, UCAC3, was released at the IAU General Assembly on 2009 August 10. It is the first all-sky release in this series and contains just over 100 million objects, about 95 million of them with proper motions, covering about R = 8–16 mag. Current epoch positions are obtained from the observations with the 20 cm aperture USNO Astrograph's “red lens,” equipped with a 4k × 4k CCD. Proper motions are derived by combining these observations with over 140 ground- and space-based catalogs, including Hipparcos/Tycho and the AC2000.2, as well as unpublished measures of over 5000 plates from other astrographs. For most of the faint stars in the southern hemisphere, the Yale/San Juan first epoch plates from the Southern Proper Motion (SPM) program (YSJ1) form the basis for proper motions. These data are supplemented by all-sky Schmidt plate survey astrometry and photometry obtained from the SuperCOSMOS project, as well as 2MASS near-IR photometry. Major differences of UCAC3 data as compared with UCAC2 include a completely new raw data reduction with improved control over systematic errors in positions, significantly improved photometry, slightly deeper limiting magnitude, coverage of the north pole region, greater completeness by inclusion of double stars, and weak detections. This of course leads to a catalog which is not as “clean” as UCAC2 and problem areas are outlined for the user in this paper. The positional accuracy of stars in UCAC3 is about 15–100 mas per coordinate, depending on magnitude, while the errors in proper motions range from 1 to 10 mas yr−1 depending on magnitude and observing history, with a significant improvement over UCAC2 achieved due to the re-reduced SPM data and inclusion of more astrograph plate data unavailable at the time of UCAC2.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

• PPM-Extended (PPMX) – a catalogue of positions and proper motions (2008, background): “This catalogue is particularly valuable for PPMX, because the limiting magnitude of the AC catalogue in this declination zone is too bright. g) UCAC2 The second US Naval Observatory CCD Astrograph Catalog, UCAC2, (Zacharias et al. , 2004) contains positions and proper motions for some 48 million obj”
• JHK observations of faint standard stars in the Mauna Kea Observatories near‐infrared photometric system (2006, unknown): “…(1997); (15) Reid & Hawley (1999); (16) Leggett (1992); (17) Pesch (1967); (18) The Second US Naval Observatory CCD Astrograph Catalogue (UCAC2), Zacharias et al. (2004); (19) Bakos, Sahu & Németh (2002); (20) Freed, Close & Siegler (2003); (21) Tucholke, Scholz & Brosche (1994); (22) Gizis…”
• THE PPMXL CATALOG OF POSITIONS AND PROPER MOTIONS ON THE ICRS. COMBINING USNO-B1.0 AND THE TWO MICRON ALL SKY SURVEY (2MASS) (2010, background): “Although position differences of 15 to 30 mas are small, modern UCAC3 observations, accurate at epoch to 15 to 70 mas (Zacharias et al. 2004) are considerably deteriorated systematically in only a few years.”
• Ground-based CCD astrometry with wide-field imagers - II. A star catalog for M 67: WFI@2.2 m MPG/ESO astrometry, FLAMES@VLT radial velocities (2008, methodology): “To link the present M 67 catalog to ICRS, we used the UCAC2 catalog (Zacharias et al. 2004) as a reference frame.”
• VERY WIDE BINARIES AND OTHER COMOVING STELLAR COMPANIONS: A BAYESIAN ANALYSIS OF THE HIPPARCOS CATALOGUE (2010, methodology): “However, the best astrometric catalogs, HIP, TY2, UCAC2, and now UCAC3 (Zacharias et al. 2010), have somewhat escaped the attention of searches for CPM pairs.”
• The Wobbly Galaxy : kinematics north and south with RAVE red-clump giants (2013, background): “RAVE proper motions are derived from several sources, although the majority of the catalogue gives PPMX (Roeser et al. 2008) or UCAC2 (Zacharias et al. 2004) proper motions.”
• The AAO/UKST SuperCOSMOS Hα survey (2005, methodology): “…the SHS, the generic SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey (SSS) astrometric reduction procedure was modified by replacing the averaged distortion map with a correction stage where the individual film distortion pattern is measured with respect to the UCAC astrometric reference catalogue (Zacharias et al. 2004).”
• THE DISCOVERY AND ANALYSIS OF VERY METAL-POOR STARS IN THE GALAXY (2005, background): “F or p er so na l u se o nl y. STARNET catalog (Röser 1996), the SuperCOSMOS catalog (Hambly et al. 2001), the Northern Proper Motion Survey (Hanson et al. 2004), the Southern Proper Motion Survey (Girard et al. 2004), and the U.S. Naval Observatory CCD Astrograph Catalog (Zacharias et al. 2004).”