The Northern Sky Optical Cluster Survey. III. A Cluster Catalog Covering PI Steradians

Abstract

We present the complete galaxy cluster catalog from the Northern Sky Optical Cluster Survey, a new, objectively defined catalog of candidate galaxy clusters at z ≾ 0.25 drawn from the Digitized Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (DPOSS). The data presented here cover the Southern Galactic Cap, as well as the less well-calibrated regions of the Northern Galactic Cap. In addition, due to improvements in our cluster finder and measurement methods, we provide an updated catalog for the well-calibrated Northern Galactic Cap region previously published in Paper II. The complete survey covers 11,411 deg^2, with over 15,000 candidate clusters. We discuss improved photometric redshifts, richnesses, and optical luminosities which are provided for each cluster. A variety of substructure measures are computed for a subset of over 11,000 clusters. We also discuss the derivation of dynamical radii r 200 and its relation to cluster richness. A number of consistency checks between the three areas of the survey are also presented, demonstrating the homogeneity of the catalog over disjoint sky areas. We perform extensive comparisons to existing optically and X-ray-selected cluster catalogs, and derive new X-ray luminosities and temperatures for a subset of our clusters. We find that the optical and X-ray luminosities are well correlated, even using relatively shallow ROSAT All Sky Survey and DPOSS data. This survey provides a good comparison sample to the MaxBCG catalog based on Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data, and complements that survey at low redshifts 0.07 < z < 0.1.

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