First Data Release of the All-sky NOAO Source Catalog

Most of the sky has been imaged with NOAO's telescopes from both hemispheres. While the large majority of these data were obtained for PI-led projects and almost all of the images are publicly available, only a small fraction have been released to the community via well-calibrated and easily accessible catalogs. We are remedying this by creating a catalog of sources from most of the public data taken on the CTIO-4m+DECam and the KPNO-4m+Mosaic3. This catalog, called the NOAO Source Catalog (NSC), contains over 2.9 billion unique objects, 34 billion individual source measurements, covers ~30,000 square degrees of the sky, has depths of ~23rd magnitude in most broadband filters with ~1-2% photometric precision, and astrometric accuracy of ~7 mas. In addition, ~2 billion objects and ~21,000 square degrees of sky have photometry in three or more bands. The NSC will be useful for exploring stellar streams, dwarf satellite galaxies, QSOs, high-proper motion stars, variable stars and other transients. The NSC catalog is publicly available via the NOAO Data Lab service.
Comment: 18 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in AJ. Revisions include more analysis and figures on the achieved data quality. The 34 billion row measurement table is now available through the NOAO Data Lab, see https://datalab.noao.edu