MSX5C Infrared Point Source Catalog

The principal objective of the astronomy experiments abroad the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) was to complete the census of the mid-infrared (4.2-25{mu}m) sky: the areas missed by the IRAS mission (about 4% of the sky was not surveyed by IRAS), and the Galactic Plane where the sensitivity of IRAS was degraded by confusion noise in the regions of high source densities or structured extended emission. The infrared instrument on MSX is named SPIRIT III; it is a 35cm clear aperture off-axis telescope with five line scanned infrared focal plane arrays of 18.3arcsec square pixels, with a high sensitivity (0.1Jy at 8.3{mu}m).

The characteristics of the 6 bands B1, B2, A, C, D and E are summarized in the "Note (1)" below. The data are contained in 7 files according to the location on the sky: 5 are related to the Galactic Plane, one (non-plane) contains the IRAS gap catalog, the the lmc.dat file contains the observations of the Large Magellanic Cloud.