VLA SDSS Stripe 82 Survey 1.4-GHz Source Catalog

This table contains results from a high-resolution radio survey of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Southern Equatorial Stripe, also known as Stripe 82. This 1.4-GHz survey was conducted with the Very Large Array (VLA) primarily in the A configuration, with supplemental B configuration data to increase sensitivity to extended structure. The survey has an angular resolution of 1.8 arcseconds and achieves a median rms noise of 52 &micro;Jy/beam (&micro;Jy/beam) over 92 deg&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. This is the deepest 1.4-GHz survey to achieve this large of an area, filling a gap in the phase space between small, deep and large, shallow surveys. It also serves as a pilot project for a larger high-resolution survey with the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA). The authors discuss the technical design of the survey and details of the observations, and outline their method for data reduction, in the reference paper. They present a catalog of 17,969 isolated radio components, for an overall source density of ~195 sources deg&lt;sup&gt;-2&lt;/sup&gt;. The astrometric accuracy of the data is excellent, with an internal check utilizing multiply observed sources yielding an rms scatter of 0.19 arcseconds in both Right Ascension and Declination. A comparison to the SDSS DR7 Quasar Catalog further confirms that the astrometry is well-tied to the optical reference frame, with mean offsets of 0.02&quot; +/- 0.01&quot; in Right Ascension, and 0.01&quot; +/- 0.02&quot; in Declination. A check of their photometry reveals a small, negative CLEAN-like bias on the level of 35 uJy. The authors report on the catalog completeness, finding that 97% of FIRST-detected quasars are recovered in the new Stripe 82 radio catalog, while faint, extended sources are more likely to be resolved out by the resolution bias. In their paper, they conclude with a discussion of the optical counterparts to the catalog sources, including 76 newly detected radio quasars. The full catalog as well as a search page and cutout server are available online at &lt;a href="http://third.ucllnl.org/cgi-bin/stripe82cutout"&gt;http://third.ucllnl.org/cgi-bin/stripe82cutout&lt;/a&gt;. The SDSS Stripe 82 observations were made with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory&#39;s (NRAO&#39;s) VLA. The data were collected over two VLA cycles, 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. The majority of the observations were taken in the A configuration, but the authors also obtained B-configuration coverage of the area in order to improve the sampling of the Fourier (U-V) plane and to increase sensitivity to the extended structure. Area 1 (delineated in black in Figure 1(a) of the paper) was covered in the A and B configurations in 2007-2008, and Area 2 (delineated in purple in Figure 1(a) of the paper) in the A and B configurations in 2008-2009. Area 1 is made up of 275 pointings, and Area 2 has 374, coming to 649 fields, and 92 deg&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; covered in total. This table was created by the HEASARC in August 2013 based on a complete machine-readable version of Table 1 from the reference paper which was kindly provided by the first author. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

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Organization: National Aeronautics and Space Administration