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ROSAT Catalog PSPC WGA Sources

Metadata Updated: April 10, 2026

WGACAT is a point source catalog generated from all ROSAT PSPC pointed observations. This catalog has been generated by N.E. White (HEASARC/GSFC), P. Giommi (SDC/ASI) and L. Angelini (HEASARC/GSFC) and is a private research effort, not related to the official catalogs generated by the ROSAT project. The WGACAT was made first publicly available in November 1994 through the HEASARC on-line service (White, Giommi and Angelini 1994), with a first minor revision in March 1995 (WGACAT95 hereafter). It was generated using all the public ROSAT PSPC pointed data available than, corresponding to 75 % of the entire set, and featured ~ 68000 detections of which 62000 were unique sources. The current version, released in May 2000 (see also the update section), is the final and complete version of WGACAT and includes the remaining sequences not processed in the WGACAT95. WGACAT (May 2000) contains about 88,000 detections, with more than 84,000 individual sources, obtained from 4160 sequences. The catalog was generated using an optimized sliding cell detect algorithm in XIMAGE (first developed for the EXOSAT project). The inner and outer parts of the images were run separately, to maximize the sensitivity to source detection. This method is very sensitive in finding point sources, but can also find spurious sources where there is extended emission. We have visually inspected each detection, removed the obvious spurious cases and assigned a quality flag to each detection. 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/wgacat
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 8ea8a9de-9e0b-4890-a309-e106a86d1063
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL ivo://nasa.heasarc/wgacat
License https://www.usa.gov/government-works
Program Code 026:000
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 2faad66853a3e6d867ab7c8ef0c2045500d6936e658d7bba06c3337986d165a9
Source Schema Version 1.1

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