Revised Catalog of GALEX Ultraviolet Sources. I. The All-sky Survey: GUVcat_AIS

Abstract: The Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) imaged the sky in two Ultraviolet (UV) bands, far-UV (FUV) and near-UV (NUV), delivering the first comprehensive sky surveys at these wavelengths. The GALEX database contains FUV and NUV images, 500~million source measurements and over 100,000 low-resolution UV spectra. [...] We present science-enhanced, clean catalogs of GALEX UV sources, with useful tags to facilitate scientific investigations. The catalogs are an improved and expanded version of our previous catalogs of UV sources (Bianchi et al. 2011, 2014: BCScat). With respect to BCScat, we have patched 640 fields for which the pipeline had improperly coadded non-overlapping observations, we provide a version with a larger sky coverage (about 10percent) [...]. We added new tags to facilitate selection and cleaning of statistical samples...: we flag sources within the footprint of extended objects (nearby galaxies, stellar clusters) so that these regions can be excluded for estimating source density. As in our previous catalogs, in GUVcat duplicate measurements of the same source are removed.[...] Such unique-source catalog is needed to study density and distributions of sources, and to match UV sources with catalogs at other wavelengths. The catalog includes all observations from the All-Sky Imaging Survey (AIS), the survey with the largest area coverage, with both FUV and NUV detectors exposed: over 28,700 fields, made up of a total of 57,000 observations ("visits"). The total area covered, when overlaps are removed and gaps accounted for, is 24,790 (GUVcat_AIS_fov055) and 22,125 (GUVcat_AIS_fov050) square degrees. The total number of unique AIS sources (eliminating duplicate measurements) is 82,992,086 (GUVcat_AIS_fov055) and 69,772,677 (GUVcat_AIS_fov050). The typical depth of the GUVcat_AIS catalog is FUV=19.9, NUV=20.8ABmag.