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Astrometry with Carte Du Ciel Plates, San Fernando Zone*

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Astrometry with Carte Du Ciel Plates, San Fernando Zone* A&A 509, A62 (2010) Astronomy DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/200912857 & c ESO 2010 Astrophysics Astrometry with Carte du Ciel plates, San Fernando zone II. CdC-SF: a precise proper motion catalogue B. Vicente1,5,C.Abad2,F.Garzón1,3, and T. M. Girard4 1 Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), 38200 La Laguna (S/C de Tenerife), Spain e-mail: [email protected] 2 Centro de Investigaciones de Astronomía (CIDA), Apdo. 264, Mérida, 3101-A Venezuela 3 Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, 38200 La Laguna (S/C de Tenerife), Spain 4 Department of Astronomy, Yale University, PO Box 208101, New Haven, CT 06520, USA 5 Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC), Apdo. 3004, 18080 Granada, Spain Received 8 July 2009 / Accepted 5 November 2009 ABSTRACT Context. The historic plates of the Carte du Ciel, an international cooperative project launched in 1887, offer valuable first-epoch material for the determination of absolute proper motions. Aims. We present the CdC-SF, an astrometric catalogue of positions and proper motions derived from the Carte du Ciel plates of the San Fernando zone, photographic material with a mean epoch of 1901.4 and a limiting magnitude of V ∼ 16, covering the declination range of −10◦ ≤ δ ≤−2◦. Methods. Digitization has been made using a conventional flatbed scanner. Special techniques have been developed to handle the combination of plate material and the large distortion introduced by the scanner. The equatorial coordinates are on the ICRS defined by Tycho-2, and proper motions are derived using UCAC2 as second-epoch positions. Results. The result is a catalogue with positions and proper motions for 560 000 stars, covering 1080 degrees2. The mean positional uncertainty is 0. 20 (0. 12 for well-measured stars) and the proper-motion uncertainty is 2.0 mas/yr (1.2 mas/yr for well-measured stars). Conclusions. The proper motion catalogue CdC-SF is effectively a deeper extension of Hipparcos, in terms of proper motions, to a magnitude of 15. Key words. astrometry – catalogs – reference systems – surveys – stars: kinematics and dynamics 1. Introduction of 2.5 mas/year. At the present time the Hipparcos and Tycho-2 catalogues are the largest high-quality proper motion surveys. The Hipparcos Catalogue (Perryman et al. 1997) contains the po- Other proper motion catalogues available at the present time sitions, parallaxes and proper motions of 118 218 stars with great are UCAC2 catalogues (Zacharias et al. 2004, 2–7 mas/yr de- / precision (proper motions precision is 1 mas year), complete up pending on the magnitude and current version has systematic = . to a magnitude of V 7 3. Due to its precision and homogene- errors of the order of 3 mas/yr), NPM (Hanson et al. 2004, ity, this catalogue constitutes an important source of information 5mas/yr, 8 < B < 18) and SPM (Girard et al. 2004,4mas/yr, and has provided a useful tool in numerous kinematic studies. 5 < V < 18.5). For an overview in detail of the current astromet- However, its relatively bright magnitude limit restricts it to very ric catalogues, see Girard (2008). nearby stars, with the number of stars per unit area also being When determining proper motions, a long time-baseline is lower than what is often desired in kinematic analyses of the highly desirable. Historical photographic records provide ideal Galaxy. material for the calculation of proper motions. This is a prime For this reason, various efforts have been made to develop motivation for the digitization and reduction of the collections astrometric catalogues that are more dense and reach deeper of photographic plates that were accumulated in observatories at magnitudes, becoming in effect an extension of the Hipparcos the end of the 19th century. catalogue. It is necessary that such catalogues contain proper In 1887, the first great astronomical project of international motions besides positions in order to provide the essential in- cooperation in history was planned in Paris. Its objective was formation with the quality and completeness needed. the construction of a complete catalogue up to a magnitude of The Tycho-2 Catalogue (Høg et al. 2000) can be considered V ∼ 12, the Astrographic Catalogue (AC), and to map the sky up an extension of Hipparcos in the way that it contains positions to V ∼ 15, the Carte du Ciel (CdC). A total of twenty observato- and proper motions for stars brighter than V ∼ 12 with errors ries around the world participated in the task of taking the neces- sary observations. This material represents the first existing pho- The Astrometric catalog is only available in electronic form at the tographic record of the complete sky and is an extremely impor- CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr tant potential resource for determining proper motions due to the (130.79.128.5) or via long time-baseline relative to modern observations, ∼100 years http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/qcat?J/A+A/509/A62 in most cases. Article published by EDP Sciences Page 1 of 9 A&A 509, A62 (2010) This study is part of a larger project, the goal of which is to produce an astrometric catalogue with proper motions for a variety of applications in Galactic kinematics, as well as to pro- vide a dense, faint reference frame by recovering and utilizing the historical CdC plates. In order to construct the catalogue, the first necessary step is to digitize these plates. The digitization and measurement process is discussed in detail in a previous pa- per (Vicente et al. 2007, hereafter Paper I), where an innovative method of digitization using a commercial flatbed scanner was presented. It was demonstrated that this device, together with the techniques developed to remove the distortion it introduces, is an alternative to more specialized measuring machines that are less available, while yielding similar measuring errors of 0. 18 Fig. 1. Positional differences obtained from two digitalizations of the as other groups, deriving astrometry from similar plate material, same plate, rotated one with regard to the other by 90◦ and then aligned although from other CdC collections (Rapaport 2006; Ortiz-Gil via a linear transformation. Notice that the amplitude in the errors in the 1998;Geffert 1996). Y axis is considerable. In addition, this distortion also varies from scan The main scientific value of positions at the epoch of to scan and from plate to plate. 1900 resides in their usefulness in providing positions to serve as the first epoch in proper motion determinations involving the been confirmed by repeated sans. Vicente et al. (2007) described ff compilation of several catalogues of di erent epochs. the method developed to calibrate and correct for scanner distor- The current paper explains the various steps and procedures tion in detail yielding excellent results. The resultant final single- used during the construction of the CdC-SF proper-motion cata- measurement internal error-estimate per exposure is 3 μm(0. 2) logue. The catalogue’s properties are described in detail, includ- for single-exposures plates and 5 μm(0. 3) for triple-exposures ing an estimation of uncertainties in the positions and proper ones. motions. For the convenience of the reader, some of the figures and tables from Paper I are reproduced here for their relevance to the catalogue description. 3. Measurement of the plates The most important characteristics of the plates that complicate 2. Digitization of the plate material with a flatbed the determination of precise astrometry include: scanner 1) the blending of the triple-exposure images on the odd- numbered declination plates; The plate material used in this work corresponds to the CdC col- 2) the blending and confusion of stars that fall on the super- lection stored in the Real Instituto y Observatorio de la Armada posed réseau grid lines; in San Fernando, Spain (ROA), which was charged with observ- ◦ ◦ 3) the false detections due to plate flaws, spurious dust and ing the area between the –2 and –10 declination. This collec- degradations that have accumulated during storage, and; tion of 1260 Carte du Ciel plates has not been exploited up to ◦ ◦ 4) typical effects in photographic material caused by optical now. Each plate covers a field of 2 × 2 , and observations were aberrations and by non-linear detectors. planned in a full overlapping strategy. Plates along odd declina- tions were exposed three times, producing a pattern of images A loss of up to 15% of stars can be expected due to interferences for each star that is roughly an equilateral triangle. All of the with the grid lines and spurious flaws as well as to the blending plates also contain superposed réseau grid lines. of the triple exposures. The plates are a historical patrimony of the institution, and For the resolution of all these problems it has been neces- as such they could not be extracted from the museum to be sary to develop the necessary programmes from scratch since measured with specialized instrumentation. Initially, reproduc- available commercial software packages are not optimized for tions were made in acetate and these were to be digitized with photographic material. All of the effects mentioned above have a measuring machine, a microdensitometer PDS. After perform- been successfully treated. Details can be found in Paper I. ing several test scans of the acetate copies using the PDS at Yale Currently, the algorithms have been applied to only one third University (USA) and the PDS at the CIDA (Venezuela), it was of the San Fernando zone; the one with a right ascension be- concluded that large unpredictable distortions due to the copy- tween 6 and 14 h, constituting 420 plates (180 simple-exposures ing process (up to 15 μm) together with the slowness of the PDS plates and 240 triple-exposures plates).
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