Vela-Carina Catalog

Vela-Carina is the fourth in a series of large area projects to map selected regions of the Galactic plane using the Spitzer Space Telescope Infrared Array Camera (IRAC). The Vela-Carina project (PID=40791) (Majewski et al. 2007, Zasowski et al. 2009) extended GLIMPSE-style coverage (two 1.2 second integrations at each position) to Galactic longitudes 255◦< l < 295◦ covering 86 square degrees of the Carina and Vela regions of the Galactic plane. The Vela-Carina Catalog (VelaCarC, or the “Catalog”), consists of the highest reliability point sources. To be in the Catalog, sources must be detected at least twice in one IRAC band and at least once in an adjacent band, which we call a “2+1” criterion, where the “1” can include the 2MASS Ks band. This yields a Vela-Carina Catalog with a reliability greater than 99.5%; that is, only five sources in a thousand are expected to be spurious. For each IRAC band the Catalog provides fluxes (with uncertainties), positions (with uncer- tainties), the areal density of local point sources, the local sky brightness, and a flag that provides information on source quality and known anomalies present in the data. This dataset or service is made available by the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) at IPAC, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.