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NRAO VLA Sky Survey Catalog

Metadata Updated: April 10, 2026

This table contains the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) Very Large Array (VLA) Sky Survey, the so-called NVSS Catalog. The NVSS Catalog covers the sky north of the J2000.0 Declination of -40 degrees (82% of the celestial sphere) at 1.4 GHz. The principal data products of the NVSS were (1) a set of 2326 4 degree by 4 degree continuum "cubes" with three planes containing Stokes I, Q, and U images, plus (2) a catalog of almost 2 million discrete sources stronger than a flux density S of about 2.5 mJy. The images all have 45 arcsecond FWHM angular resolution and nearly uniform sensitivity. Their rms brightness fluctuations are approximately 0.45 mJy/beam = 0.14 K (Stokes I) and approximately 0.29 mJy/beam = 0.09 K (Stokes Q and U). The rms uncertainties in right ascension and declination vary from <= ~1 arcsecond for the 400,000 sources stronger than 15 mJy to 7 arcseconds at the survey limit. The NVSS was made as a service to the astronomical community. All data products, user software, and updates were released via the World-Wide Web as soon as they were produced and verified. For more complete information on the NVSS, please refer to the NVSS website at <a href="http://www.cv.nrao.edu/nvss/">http://www.cv.nrao.edu/nvss/</a>; This table was created by the HEASARC in October 2002 based on the file <a href="ftp://ftp.cv.nrao.edu/nvss/CATALOG/NVSSCatalog.text.gz">ftp://ftp.cv.nrao.edu/nvss/CATALOG/NVSSCatalog.text.gz</a> provided by the NVSS Catalog's authors. It was updated by the HEASARC in June 2009 to fix a problem with the original ingest in which the leading digit of some flux fields was lost. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: See this page for license information.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date April 10, 2026

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date April 10, 2026
Publisher High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center
Maintainer
Identifier ivo://nasa.heasarc/nvss
Data Last Modified 2026-04-06
Category Astrophysics
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 6f8feb94-cc5e-4bcc-b75a-d1dae1153f18
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL ivo://nasa.heasarc/nvss
License https://www.usa.gov/government-works
Program Code 026:000
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 4c59c7697c09eda13c6952dafd6ca5de1fa56b55fc905c8d577b79218d9133cf
Source Schema Version 1.1

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