The Automated Plate Scanner Catalog of the Palomar sky survey. I - Scanning parameters and procedures

Abstract

We have just completed scanning glass copies of the blue and red plates in the original Palomar Observatory - National Geographic Sky Survey (POSS I) for the fields with b >/= |20 deg.|. All of the detected images are being cataloged with positions, shapes, magnitudes and colors. The stellar and non-stellar images are separated using a neural network approach. We estimate that there will be nearly a billion stellar objects and image data for several million galaxies in the finished database. The database, including the cataloged objects and the pixel data for the non-stellar images, will be available to the scientific community on-line via Internet. This paper is the first of a series describing the APS Catalog of the POSS I. In this first paper we describe the operation of the APS and the scanning procedures and parameters for the POSS I.