TASS Mark IV Patches Catalog (version 2)

Michael Richmond
Oct 17, 2006
May 30, 2007 (version 2)

The Amateur Sky Survey (TASS) has released a catalog based on its survey of the northern sky. A paper describing the instruments, operations, software and calibration has been accepted by Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and will appear in the December, 2006, issue. Here's the abstract:

The Amateur Sky Survey (TASS) is a loose confederation of amateur and professional astronomers. We describe the design and construction of our Mark IV systems, a set of wide-field telescopes with CCD cameras which take simultaneous images in the V and I_C passbands. We explain our observational procedures and the pipeline which processes and reduces the images into lists of stellar positions and magnitudes. We have compiled a large database of measurements for stars in the northern celestial hemisphere with V-band magnitudes in the range 7 < V < 13. This paper describes data taken over the four-year period starting November, 2001. One of our results is a catalog of repeated measurements on the Johnson-Cousins system for over 4.3 million stars.

You can read manuscripts of the paper below.

• Download a postscript version of the manuscript
• Download a PDF version of the manuscript

You can access the Mark IV data in several forms.

• The main Mark IV database contains data which has only preliminary photometric calibration, and includes some measurements from cloudy nights and poor images. Some of these measurements are unreliable. On the good side, it contains every measurement from every night we operated.
  • Several ways to interact with the Mark IV database
  • Go directly to the Mark IV database website

• The "patches catalog" contains a single record of summary information for a subset of all stars. It includes only stars detected in at least 5 image pairs, during the period Nov 11, 2001, to Nov 17, 2005. The catalog is described in the Mark IV survey paper.

  Version 2 of the catalog contains small corrections to the mean V-band and mean I-band magnitudes, which are described in TASS Technical Note 105. This version 2 replaces the original "patches catalog."

  • download the entire patches catalog (version 2) BEWARE! Large file The size of the catalog is about 490 MByte (491,964,710 bytes, to be exact)
  • ReadMe for the catalog file (version 2) which describes its format, byte-by-byte

  Version 1 of the catalog is obsolete, but remains here for reference.

  • download the entire patches catalog (version 1) BEWARE! Large file The size of the catalog is about 490 MByte (491,964,710 bytes, to be exact)
  • ReadMe for the catalog file (version 1) which describes its format, byte-by-byte
  • Copy of the catalog in the Vizier system at SIMBAD, which allows you to search for objects matching particular criteria. Probably the best choice for most people. Catalog II/271 in the SIMBAD system contains version 1 of the patches catalog.