IRAS Explanatory Supplement
VII. Analysis of Processing
A. Overview
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The purpose of this chapter is to describe the general characteristics of the catalogs of point and small extended sources and of the sky brightness images. The distribution on the sky of different types of infrared sources is presented not for scientific purposes, but to provide a context within which to interpret the characteristics of specific objects (Section VII.B). Detailed discussions are presented of the positional and photometric accuracy of the point sources (Sections VII.C,D). Although the important questions of the completeness and reliability of the catalogs are deferred until the next chapter, some of the results of the processing relevant to these topics are discussed in Sections VII.E and VII.F. An overview of the results of associating IRAS sources with objects appearing in other catalogs is given in Section VII.G. Because it is crucial that the user gain an understanding of the various flags that accompany the observations of a source, the properties of these flags, in particular the threshold values that indicate that the measurement of a source may be suspect, are described in Section VII.H. The properties of the catalog of small extended sources are presented in Section VII.I. The extended emission images are discussed in Section VII.J.
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