Booth Abstract

Demo Booth (D1) Janet Evans (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian)

Chandra Source Catalog: Enabling a Science ready Catalog and Data Products

The latest version of the Chandra Source Catalog (CSC) 2.0 includes scientifically useful properties for more than 315,000 distinct X-ray sources. These properties were extracted from ~375,000 source detections included on more than 10,000 Chandra observations that were released publicly through the end of 2014.

Source detection is performed on “stacked” (co-added) observations of the same field to improve detection sensitivity for fields with multiple observations. Numerous detection properties are evaluated at both the stacked-observation and single-observation levels .

Numeric properties have associated uncertainties, usually independent lower and upper confidence limits, and most properties are evaluated in 5 energy bands. As a result of this multiplexing, the catalog databases include approximately 1700 columns of information.

In addition to the tabulated source properties, CSC 2.0 also provides roughly 40 different types of science-ready FITS data products. Since these data products are pre-computed by applying all of the appropriate calibration steps (e.g., matching astrometry, merging observations, applying exposure corrections, removing background) included in the catalog pipelines, they can be used directly by the end-user to simplify significantly the effort required to perform detailed analyses of properties for scientifically meaningful samples of sources.

We will demonstrate the interfaces to the CSC to both tabulated data and FITS data products, the ease of initiating science analysis, and finally show by example what it takes to build a legacy science catalog.