LQRF: Large Quasar Reference Frame

The LQRF (Large Quasar Reference Frame) was built with the care of avoiding wrong matches of its constituents quasars, of homogenizing the astrometry from the different catalogs and lists from which the constituent quasars are gathered, and of attaining the milli-arcsec global alignment to the ICRF (International Celestial Reference Frame), as well as typical individual source position accuracies even to better than 100 milli-arcsec.

Starting from the updated and presumably complete LQAC (Large Quasar Astrometric Catalog) list of QSOs, initial optical positions for those quasars are found in the USNO B1.0 and GSC2.3 catalogs, and from the SDSS Data Release 5. The initial positions are next placed onto UCAC2 based reference frames, following by an alignment to the ICRF, as well as of the most precise sources from the VLBA calibrator list and from the VLA calibrator list - when reliable optical counterparts exist.