Northern Sky Variability Survey: Public Data Release

The Northern Sky Variability Survey (NSVS) is a temporal record of the sky over the optical magnitude range from 8 to 15.5. It was conducted in the course of the first-generation Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE-I) using a robotic system of four comounted unfiltered telephoto lenses equipped with CCD cameras. The survey was conducted from Los Alamos, New Mexico, and primarily covers the entire northern sky. Some data in southern fields between declinations 0° and -38° are also available, although with fewer epochs and noticeably lesser quality. The NSVS contains light curves for approximately 14 million objects. With a 1 yr baseline and typically 100–500 measurements per object, the NSVS is the most extensive record of stellar variability across the bright sky available today. In a median field, bright unsaturated stars attain a point-to-point photometric scatter of ∼0.02 mag and position errors within 2″. At Galactic latitudes |b| < 20°, the data quality is limited by severe blending due to the ∼14″ pixel size. We present basic characteristics of the data set and describe data collection, analysis, and distribution. All NSVS photometric measurements are available for on-line public access from the Sky Database for Objects in Time-Domain (SkyDOT) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Copies of the full survey photometry may also be requested on tape.