The Japanese Space Agency JAXA's Akari Mission has recently released some infrared datasets.
Probably not of much interest to many, but people who use the IRAS TDFs that come with Guide may like them due to some serious improvement in positional accuracy in one, as well as a greater number of objects.
http://www.ir.isas.jaxa.jp/AKARI/Observation/PSC/Public/
IRC is the InfraRed Camera Catalogue, fluxes given at 9 and 18 microns. Positions are accurate to one or two arcseconds on the whole, and errors in position are smaller than that.
Drawn as a small yellow circle, info gives fluxes and more info some limited information selected from the catalogue. Download
http://www.ir.isas.jaxa.jp/AKARI/Observation/PSC/Public/data/AKARI-IRC_PSC_V1.txt.gz
from the above and unzip it to the Guide directory, it'll be 160+ Mb unzipped, so if you place it elsewhere, remember that the first line in the TDF _has_ to point to the full path and have the same name in full as the file.
That one's easy.
The Far InfraRed Survey is just under 100 Mb unzipped, and can be downloaded here
http://www.ir.isas.jaxa.jp/AKARI/Observation/PSC/Public/data/AKARI-FIS_BSC_V1.txt.gz
This one has more problems. Positional accuracy is not good, it can be as bad as when IRAS is at its best. Up to a dozen arcsecs off. However, this is the first list of new objects at long InfraRed wavelengths since IRAS, so lots of new stuff.
Again the TDF has to have the full correct name and path in the first entry for this file, once the file is unzipped and given a home on the hard disk. Small orange circles are centred on the given position, rather than error ellipses, as no usable error ellipse information is given.
This one has an extra problem though. They forgot to sort it on RA. So you'll need to do that first. Bill has a routine called sorter.exe for doing things like this, however I forget where it lives on the Project Pluto websites.
These two catalogues are JAXA products :-
"Please include the following text as a footnote to the title of your paper;
"Based on observations with AKARI, a JAXA project with the participation of ESA."
or in the acknowledgement:
"This research is based on observations with AKARI, a JAXA project with the participation of ESA.""
The manuals for these catalogues, if needed to say expand or further annotate the TDF output, are at the first mentioned urls.
Although the first major IR satellite in years and years, this is just the start of the bias in the spaceborne telescopes in years to come. NASA's WISE and the James Webb replacement for Hubble are InfraRed biased, Near or Mid IR, And ESA's Herschel will be Far InfraRed amongst other passbands.
Cheers
John
Below's the TDF for both files, just cut and paste it as a text editor and save it as ascii/text in the guide directory under any name you like, eg akari.tdf :-
file AKARI-FIS_BSC_V1.txt
title AKARI FIS Bright Source Catalogue
RA H 27 9
units0 -2
de d 37 9
text 12 14
~b 12 14 AKARI-FIS-V1 J%s\n\n
~r 27 9 RA 2000 : %R\n
~r 37 9 Dec2000 : %D\n\n
~r 27 9 RA %s DE %[37,9] degrees\n\n
~b 65 11 65 micron flux %s Jy
~r109 10 err %s Jy
~b 76 11 \n 90 micron flux %s Jy
~r119 10 err %s Jy
~b 87 11 \n140 micron flux %s Jy
~r129 10 err %s Jy
~b 98 11 \n160 micron flux %s Jy
~r139 10 err %s Jy
~b 1 1 \n\n
~r 1 1 Quality Flags [3 High 2 Confirmed 1 Unconfirmed]\n\n
~r149 1 65 = %s 90 = %[151,1] 140 = %[153,1] 160 = %[155,1]\n
pref AKARI-FIS-V1 J
sort 1
epoch 2000
type sC6a9bff;e0,0,20;
goto spaces
goto case
label spaces
field 0.00 20.00
shown 5
end
file AKARI-IRC_PSC_V1.txt
title AKARI IRC Point Source Catalogue
RA H 27 9
units0 -2
de d 37 9
text 12 14
~b 12 14 AKARI-IRC-V1 J%s\n\n
~r 27 9 RA 2000 : %R\n
~r 37 9 Dec2000 : %D\n\n
~r 27 9 RA %s DE %[37,9] degrees\n\n
~b 71 10 9 micron flux %s Jy
~r 93 9 err %s Jy
~b 82 10 \n18 micron flux %s Jy
~r103 9 err %s Jy
~b 1 2 \n\n
~r 1 2 Quality Flags [3 High 2 Confirmed 1 Unconfirmed]\n\n
~r113 1 9 = %s 18 = %[115,1]\n
pref AKARI-IRC-V1 J
sort 1
epoch 2000
type sC00ffff;e0,0,20;
goto spaces
goto case
label spaces
field 0.00 20.00
shown 5
end