Gaia Ecliptic Pole Catalog
The Gaia Ecliptic Pole Catalog was created to support the Gaia Mission .
The Ecliptic Pole Catalog (EPC, later Gaia Ecliptic Pole Catalog, GEPC) was created to measure the poles . The southern part of the catalog was created through observations with the 2.2-meter telescope of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in La Silla , Chile. It contains precise positions, UBV I photometry for the southern field and the corresponding magnitudes.
The northern part was created with the CFHT 3.6 meter telescope on Mauna Kea , Hawaii.
The GEPC-V.-3.0 catalog contains 612,946 objects from a field of one square degree each at the north and south poles. The northern pole is relatively poor in stars and contains 164,468 objects, while the southern pole is still in the area of the Large Magellanic Cloud and contains 448,478 objects.
Version 3.0 of the GEPC data was required for the initial calibration right at the start of the mission. The test phase ( commissioning phase) of the Gaia space probe ended on July 18, 2014. A calibration phase of 28 days followed, during which the ecliptic poles were intensively measured. During this time, Gaia was operated in Ecliptic Poles Scan Law mode (EPSL), in which the two poles were measured twice with each revolution.
The catalog is part of the Initial Gaia Source List (IGSL), the initial catalog for comparing the objects found by Gaia with the previous star catalogs used for Gaia DR1 . In contrast to the other IGSL catalogs, no magnitude limit was set for the GEPC. For Gaia DR2 and the following catalogs, the GEPC no longer plays a role.
literature
- M. Altmann: Documentation of the Gaia Ecliptic Pole Catalog (GEPC) . GAIA-C3-TN-ARI-MA-015-1. December 18, 2013 ( esa.int ).