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National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Goddard Space Flight Center

Astrophysics Science Division | Sciences and Exploration

This website is kept for archival purposes only and is no longer updated.

CATALOG OF INFRARED OBSERVATIONS

Version 5.1 (December 2000)

[Galactic Center @ 12.4 microns]
Galactic Center
@ 12.4 µm
by Daniel Y. Gezari

by

Daniel Y. Gezari
Patricia S. Pitts
Marion Schmitz
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

The Catalog of Infrared Observations (CIO) Version 5.1 is a database of over 396,000 published infrared observations of more than 64,000 individual astronomical sources over the wavelength range from 1 to 1000 microns. Version 5.1 includes observations published through 1998. The last printed edition of the Catalog (Third Edition) was released in June 1993 as NASA Reference Publication RP-1294.


1. Access the Catalog Data

There are three ways to interactively access the data in the on-line Catalog: 1) Browse the Catalog (scroll through the Catalog listings), 2) Access the Catalog data by source name, or 3) Search the Catalog listings by specifying position/wavelength/flux. You can also access the database of bibliographic references for each Catalog data entry by searching the bibliography of journal articles from which the catalog data were obtained.

[Access Catalog]

2. Access the Atlas of Infrared Sources

It can be difficult to locate a source in the Catalog by its name, because source names are not standardized and are often abbreviated in the database. However, all of the object names contained in the database are listed alphabetically in an Atlas of Infrared Sources, which is a supporting tool built into the Catalog.

Click on the red button to find the source name in the Atlas, and link to its location in the Catalog. You can then scroll up and down to identify records corresponding to the source. Obviously, this option does not restrict the results to any particular source, but does provide an efficient way to find the source in the Catalog.

[Locate Source]

3. Access the Bibliography

You can view the collection of journal articles from which the Catalog data were obtained, arranged alphabetically by first author. The listing includes the title of the paper and the bibliographic reference number. From the CIO Search Page you can search the bibliographic database by typing in a bibliographic reference number.

Select the button corresponding to the last name of the first author:

[A] [B] [C] [D] [E] [F] [G] [H] [I] [J] [K] [L] [M]
[N] [O] [P] [Q] [R] [S] [T] [U] [V] [W] [X] [Y] [Z]

4. Supporting Material

[Help] CIO Help Page
[Intro] User's Manual for the Catalog of Infrared Observations and database
[Download] Download the Catalog of Infrared Observations data files. (NOTE: It is not necessary to download the data files in order to access the Catalog. You can access all of the Catalog data directly from this Website using option #1 above.) Use this option to download any of the database files to your computer for local processing and analysis.

The CIO (v. 3.5) is available on CD-ROM from the ADC (Astronomical Data Center). It is included in their CD-ROM Selected Astronomical Catalogs Vol. 3. [Link to ADC CD-ROM page]

Links to other Web sites with more information on infrared astronomy

Acknowledgments

The search engine for this site was designed by Terry Beck, (Advanced Computer Concepts, Inc.) using MySql; under contract with NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics(LASP).

Special thanks are due to Dan Kodesh, formerly of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and Global Science & Technology Inc., who designed the original Search Page software using ObjectStore at the Applied Information Sciences Branch (Code 935) at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and to Bob Cromp, formerly of Code 935.

Version 4 of the CIO was created with the help of Mila Airapetian, Velma Greenlee, Leonid Marochnik, and Denise Proctor, of Computer Sciences Corporation.

We made use of two invaluable resources to locate positions and verify identifications of astronomical objects: 1) Set of Identifications, Measurements and Bibliography for Astronomical Data (SIMBAD) of the Centre de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS), 2) NASA Extragalactic Database (NED), a service of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)

IRAS Point Source Catalog cross-identifications and flux data for version 5.1 were obtained from CATSCAN, another excellent IPAC utility

Some of the icons used on the CIO Web pages were obtained from The Graphic Station, The Icon Browser, Pam Bytes Free Web Graphics, Randy's Icon Bazaar