Archives of Photographic PLates for Astronomical USE

Data Release 1

Data Release 1 (DR1) was published on April 24, 2015. It contains data from the Bamberg, Hamburg, and Potsdam plate collections. DR1 in numbers: 25612 scans, 19335 plates, 1.66 billion extracted sources with positions and uncalibrated magnitudes, 26526 digital images of plate covers and logbook pages, 77 logbooks. The total size of the published files is 17 TB.

Please refer to the contents of APPLAUSE DR1 for more details on what is included in the data release.
Mollweide plots of the archives and their plates FOV in APPLAUSE DR1 see Archives DR1

The following images illustrate that 98.9% of the sky is covered by plates in DR1. The most observed region is located in the constellation Cygnus, with a total number of 1013 plates. Areas with no data are shown in grey.

Astrometric solutions to the plate scans have been derived on the basis of the UCAC4 catalogue. Extracted sources with assigned right ascension and declination have been cross-matched with the Tycho-2 and UCAC4 catalogues. APPLAUSE DR1 contains 837 million sources with matched UCAC4 designations and 111 million sources with Tycho-2 designations.

Photometric data in DR1 includes only raw extracted magnitudes and fluxes, provided by the SExtractor software. No photometric calibration of any kind has been carried out at this stage.

Plate scans and metadata were processed with PyPlate version 1.0 (subversions 1.0.2 through 1.0.14).

The data processing workflow that was used to prepare DR1, is described in the following conference paper:

  • Tuvikene T., Edelmann H., Groote D., Enke H., and the APPLAUSE Collaboration. Workflow for plate digitization, data extraction and publication. Astroplate 2014 proceedings (link to PDF), pp. 127-130.

Please refer to the contents of APPLAUSE DR1 for more details on what is included in the data release.