ROSAT Status Report #181: Release of HRI Catalog Update

[Michael Arida <arida@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov>]

THIRD RELEASE OF THE ROSAT HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGER SOURCE CATALOG

The ROSAT Consortium (the Max-Planck-Institut fuer extraterrestrische
Physik, the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory, Leicester University, and the Astrophysikalisches Institut
Potsdam) announces an update to  "THE ROSAT SOURCE CATALOG
OF POINTED OBSERVATIONS WITH THE HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGER" (ROSHRICAT).  
This catalog contains arcsecond positions and count rates of detected
sources from 4567 public ROSAT HRI observations covering 1.7% of the 
sky, including 10861 high confidence detections.

The catalog consists of all primary source parameters from the automated
detection algorithm employed by the Standard Analysis Software
System (SASS).  In addition each observation has been quality checked,
both by automatic algorithms and by detailed visual inspection.  The
results of this quality checking are contained as a set of logical-value
flags for each principal source parameter.  If a source parameter is
suspect, the associated flag is set to "TRUE"; parameters with no
obvious problems maintain the default, "FALSE", value.  In addition to
the catalog, data products for each screened observation are also
available.  These data products include the screened source lists and
FITS images.

Detailed information about the catalog and methods of access to the
catalog and data products can be obtained from the ROSAT Results Archive
web pages in Germany, in the US, and in the UK:

http://wave.xray.mpe.mpg.de/rosat/rra
http://www.aip.de/groups/xray/rosat/rra.html
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/rosat/rra/RRA.html
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/rosat/rsdc_www/rra.html
http://ledas-www.star.le.ac.uk/rosat/rra/

The ROSAT High Resolution Imager Source Catalog will continue to be
updated as new HRI observations are screened and become public.  New
versions will be announced via the electronic ROSAT Status reports and
on the RRA web sites at MPE, GSFC, SAO, AIP and Leicester.
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