Swift UVOT Serendipitous Source Catalogue (UVOTSSC)

The first version (now version 1.1) of the Swift UVOT Serendipitous Source Catalogue (UVOTSSC) has been produced by processing the data obtained from the Swift Ultraviolet and Optical Telescope (UVOT) from the beginning of the mission (2005) until 1st of October of 2010. 

The data processing was performed at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL, University College London, U.K.) using Swift FTOOLS from NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Software (HEASOFT), with some customising of the UVOT packages in order to get more complete source detection and to apply quality flags to the sources. 

The catalogue contains positions, photometry in three UV and three optical bands, morphological information and quality flags. The total number of observations included in the catalogue is 23 059, giving 6 200 016 sources of which 2 027 265 have multiple entries in the source table because they have been detected in more than one observation. 

The catalogue (uvotssc1_1.tar.gz) is now available for download along with a brief description and an even briefer Readme.txt. The catalogue is also available in six sections, each one covering 4 hours in RA, to make them smaller and more manageable (e.g. uvotssc_00_v1.1.tar.gz covers 0 to 4hours in RA). The SUMMARY table is the same and complete for all 6 sections. The entire catalogue is also available from the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS).

Version 1.1 has been updated from version 1 as follows: the source source identifier listed in the IAUNAME column has changed from ‘SWIFTUVOT’ to ‘UVOTSSC1’.  In addition, in a few instances multiple SOURCE IDs shared the same IAUNAME. They are now distinguished by having a letter a,b,c etc. appended to their name.

UVOT detected sources on the sky

 

This picture shows the distribution of the sources included in UVOTSSC on the sky.

About these UVOTSSC pages: These UVOTSSC web pages are made up of six sections: an introduction to the catalogue, the data processing, data selection, an assessment of the catalogue properties, known issues and finally the catalogue format. These sections are listed in the menu on the right hand side. The data processing and catalogue properties sections have their own sub-menus. 

Swift UVOT Serendipitous Source Catalogue (UVOTSSC):

Key Links:

Associated PDFs:

uvotssc_brief_description_v1_1.pdf