The Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey. II. Catalog of the Image Data

We present a catalog of 8358 sources extracted from images produced by the Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey (BGPS). The BGPS is a survey of the millimeter dust continuum emission from the northern Galactic plane. The catalog sources are extracted using a custom algorithm, Bolocat, which was designed specifically to identify and characterize objects in the large-area maps generated from the Bolocam instrument. The catalog products are designed to facilitate follow-up observations of these relatively unstudied objects. The catalog is 98% complete from 0.4 Jy to 60 Jy over all object sizes for which the survey is sensitive (<3farcm5). We find that the sources extracted can best be described as molecular clumps—large dense regions in molecular clouds linked to cluster formation. We find that the flux density distribution of sources follows a power law with dN/dS vprop S ^-2.4±0.1 and that the mean Galactic latitude for sources is significantly below the midplane: langbrang = (-0fdg095 ± 0fdg001).