How to use the 2QZ catalogue search

General comments

With the exception of RA,dec position (see below), all search criteria and combined with an AND operation. That is, the returned objects will satisfy all the specified criteria.

There are no compulsory criteria which must be filled in. You could if you wished run a search with no criteria set at all and it would return all objects in the catalogue. This is strongly discouraged though as it would take a very long time and when the results finally came back, your browser probably would not be able to display it all anyway.  The only constraint made on the parameters you fill in is that if a search around a position is made, all three parameters, RA, DEC and RADIUS must be used.

Target position:

All RA and dec positions may be input in either decimal degrees (ddd.ddd -dd.ddd) or hours, minutes, seconds (hh mm ss.ss -dd mm ss.ss) format.

There are two positional search mechanisms.
 

By position and radius:

A position must be specified in RA,dec coordinates and all objects within a certain radius of that point are returned. Radius is given in minutes of arc.

RA format: hours, minutes and seconds (hh mm ss.ss) or decimal degrees (d.ddd) e.g.:
12 30 00 or 187.6380

DEC format: degrees, minutes and seconds (+/-dd mm ss.s) or decimal degrees (+/-d.ddd). e.g.:
-30 30 00 or -30.50

RADIUS format: this is always in arcminutes. e.g.:
30.0
 
 

By maximum/minimum RA and/or declination:

Objects are selected if they have positions within the specified limits. J2000 coordinates are assumed.  Any number of the limits may be input (none to all).  There are special cases to consider when using RA minimum and/or maximum.

If only one RA limit (minimum or maximum) is entered this is assume to be bounded at
RA=0/24h, so  a search with only:
ramax=00 30 0
will be interpretted as ramin=00 00 0 ramax=00 30 0

If both RA limits are used (minimum and maximum) then the search is done between the limits.  In the special case of a search spanning RA=0h, the search algorithm will also perform a valid search.  For example
ramin=23 30 0 ramax=00 30 0
will result in sources around RA=0h being selected.
 

Object Names

Here you can search for an specific 2QZ object name (IAU format) or some substring of a name. For example searching for J235935.4-313344 would find just this object, while searching for J2359 would find all objects which have names beginning with this string. The 2QZ at the beginning of the full name is not required.
 

Object identification

There are six different object classes listed in the 2QZ catalogue:
 
QSO spectrum with one of more broad lines (>1000 km/s)
NELG spectrum with one or more narrow lines (<1000 km/s)
gal galaxy spectrum with no emission lines
star galactic star spectrum
cont high signal to noise spectrum (S/N>10) with no identifiable emission or absorption features
?? unclassifiable spectrum.

There are also a number of sub classes, which are placed after the main classification in parentheses:
 
BAL broad absorption line QSO
DA DA white dwarf (hydrogen Balmer line dominated)
DB DB white dwarf (neutral helium dominated)
DO DO white dwarf (singly ionized helium dominated)
DZ DZ white dwarf (calcium H,K dominated)
CV Cataclysmic variable
DA/M DA - M dwarf binary
DB/M DB - M dwarf binary

For a fuller description of the classification scheme see Croom et al. (2001) - Paper V. or Croom et al. (2003) - Paper XII.

Magnitudes and colours

You may also select objects based on both their aparent magnitudes and colours.  The survey is flux limited in the bJ band with 18.25<bJ <20.85.  Therefore a selection in either u or r will not be complete to any given flux limits, but will depend on the colour distribution of the sources.  When selecting on the basis of colour it should also be noted that objects were included in the catalogue which have only upper limits on their r-band magnitudes from the photographic r plates.  These objects are indicated by given them a colour which is based on their bJ and the r plate limit.  For r plate upper limits the (bJ-r) colour is defined as:
(bJ-r)=(bJ-rlim)-10
The -10 is used to differentiate between normal colours and colours constructed with only an upper limit in the r-band.  Any sources with (bJ-r) <  -9  will have only upper limits in r.  When constraining a search with a maximum or minimum r-band magnitude for r-plate non-detections the r plate limits are used (without the -10).

Redshift

Specify redshift range to select.

Data quality

Two data quality criteria are available:

Quality Flag: The quality flag contains information on both the reliabilty of the object's type identification and the assigned redshift.
Quality = 10 × ID_quality + redshift_quality
ID_quality and redshift_quality are 1, 2 or 3 meaning `Good', `Poor' and `Too poor to classify' respectively.  Therefore the best quality objects have a 11 quality flag, while the worst have a 33 quality flag.

Signal-to-noise ratio: Signal-to-noise is calculated in the 4000 - 5000 Å band.

Data output format

The data are available in a number of formats. The catalogue is a single ASCII file with ~50000 lines, one for each object in the catalogue. The search tool will output a page containing the basic details of each object selected (name, position, object type, redshift). There are also links provided for the following: These links are from the coloured balls on the left hand side of the results table. In a number of cases we have repeat observation of an object. There will then be two or more coloured balls for each data type with the numbers 1, 2... printed on them. Data are sorted by quality rather than observation date. The first spectrum is the best available observation. If a coloured ball has a red cross through it, that data/image is not available on-line. This is typically the case for non-2dF/6dF data.

Lastly, when setting the maximum number of records, we recommend that the user doesn't set this value to be too large (> 1000), as the browser will struggle to display the table. In all cases the catalogue file produced as output from the search (there is a link to this at the bottom of the results page) contains all the selected objects, not only those up to the maximum number of rows.

WWW and CD-ROM formats

The data presented here are available via the world-wide-web at http://www.2dfquasar.org/ and on CD-ROM. For ease of use, we have endeavoured to keep both formats as similar as possible. There are minor differences however, enforced by the different capabilities of the two media. Most notably, lack of space on the CD, means that it contains only the simple version of the FITS files (without extenstions) and does not contain postscript images of the spectra or SuperCOSMOS postage stamp images. If you require the data which is unavailable on the CD you can obtain them from the 2QZ website.

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The 2QZ team (July 2003)