Dixon Master List: 84,510 Radio Source Observations from 30 Catalogs

November 1981 data from the 43rd version of the Dixon Master List, containing 84,510 entries of radio source flux density observations. The list was compiled by NASA HEASARC from about thirty source catalogs available as of 1981, with corrections applied in 2005 and 2019. It represents a historical aggregation of observations, where a single source may appear under multiple names.

Use Cases

• Cross-referencing radio source observations based on flux density measurements from multiple historical catalogs.
• Analyzing the frequency-dependent behavior of known radio sources based on aggregated observations.
• Studying the historical naming conventions and catalog overlaps for celestial radio sources.

Strengths

• Aggregates observations from about thirty different source catalogs into a single list.
• Contains 84,510 entries after the removal of 49 duplicate records in 2019.
• Positions were corrected in 2005 after an earlier precession error was discovered.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The data is a list of observations, not a de-duplicated list of unique sources, and source names are not standardized.
• The core data is from 1981, limiting its coverage of modern discoveries.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA HEASARC)

Collection Method

Combined about thirty catalogs of radio sources available as of November 1981 into a common format.

Time Range

Observations compiled as of November 1981.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 19:40:21.295032; freshness should be verified