The Herschel Space Observatory was the fourth cornerstone mission in the European Space Agency
(ESA) science programme with excellent broad band imaging capabilities in the submillimetre and far-infrared part of
the spectrum. Although the spacecraft finished its observations in 2013, it left a large legacy dataset that is far
from having been fully scrutinized and still has potential for new scientific discoveries. This is specifically true
for the photometric observations of the PACS and SPIRE instruments that scanned >10% of the sky at 70, 100, 160, 250,
350 and 500 microns. Some source catalogs have already been produced by individual observing programs, but there
are many observations that would never be analyzed for their full source content. To maximize the science return of
the SPIRE and PACS data sets, our international team of instrument experts with the lead of our observatory is in the
process of building the Herschel
Point Source Catalog (HPSC) from all scan map observations. Our homogeneous source extraction enables a
systematic and unbiased comparison of sensitivity across the different Herschel fields that single programs will
generally not be able to provide. The extracted point sources will contain individual YSOs of our Galaxy, unresolved
YSO clusters in resolved nearby galaxies and unresolved galaxies of the local and distant Universe that are related to
star formation. Such a huge dataset will help scientists better understand the evolution from interstellar clouds to
individual stars. Furthermore the analysis of stellar clusters and the star formation on galactic scales will add more
details to the understanding of star formation laws through time.
I present our findings on comparison of different source detection and photometric tools. First results of the
extractions are shown along with the description of our pipelines and catalogue entries. We also provide an additional
science product, the structure noise map, that is used for the quality assessment of the catalogue in terms of
photometric accuracy, reliability and completeness. With the help of these maps I will show how the immediate
celestial environment affects the detection and extraction quality.
|
