The Plane Quasar Survey: DR1

To generate this sample, we apply UV-IR color selection criteria to photometric data from the Ultraviolet Galactic Plane Survey as part of GALEX-CAUSE, the Million Quasars Catalog, Gaia DR2, and Pan-STARRS DR1. 165 of these 305 candidate UV-bright active galactic nuclei (AGN; 54%) have published spectroscopic redshifts from 45 different surveys, confirming them as AGN.

We further obtained low-dispersion, optical, long-slit spectra with the Apache Point Observatory 3.5m, MDM 2.4m, and MDM 1.3m telescopes for 84 of the candidates, and confirm 86% (N=72) as AGN, generally with z<0.6. Of these 72 confirmed AGN, 25 are newly discovered low-latitude QSOs without any previous spectroscopy. These sources fill a gap in the Galactic latitude coverage of the available samples of known UV-bright QSO background probes.