VizieR Online Data Catalog: Galactic Plane Infrared Polarization Survey, DR4 (Clemens+, 2020)

Descriptions of the motivation, design, and implementation of the data collection strategies for GPIPS are detailed in the survey introduction paper (Paper I, Clemens et al., 2012ApJS..200...19C), the survey calibration paper (Clemens et al., 2012ApJS..200...20C, Paper II), and the first data release (DR1) paper (Clemens et al., 2012ApJS..200...21C, Paper III). GPIPS was conducted over more than 400 nights on the 1.83 m Perkins telescope between 2006 and 2019. NIR polarimetric observations were obtained for overlapping sky fields spanning Galactic longitudes (GL) of 18°-56° and Galactic latitudes (GB) of -1° to +1° in the northern, inner Milky Way disk. Each equatorial-oriented sky field covered one 10x10-arcmin² field of view (FOV) of the Mimir instrument, pointed toward 1 of 3237 centers on the 9'x9' spaced grid making up GPIPS. The Mimir pixel size of 0.58x0.58-arcsec² was designed to adequately sample the ~1.5" average seeing at the Perkins telescope site. Each FOV was observed as 96 (or up to 119) individual images, each of 2.5s exposure time. Each image was taken through 1 of 16 independent rotational orientations of an internal, cold, half-wave plate (HWP) in Mimir to modulate the incoming linear polarization for analysis by a fixed, internal, cold wire grid prior to detection by the 1024x1024-pixel InSb ALADDIN III array detector. Performing a six-position (or seven-position) sky dither, with typical offsets of 15''-18'', for each sky field allowed removal of the effects due to bad or missing detector pixels, boosted the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), and provided robustness against a variety of observing, data, or data-processing problems.

(4 data files).