The Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey. II. Catalog of the Image Data

We present a catalog of 8358 sources extracted from images produced by the Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey (BGPS). The BGPS is a survey of the millimeter dust continuum emission from the northern Galactic plane. The catalog sources are extracted using a custom algorithm, Bolocat, which was designed specifically to identify and characterize objects in the large-area maps generated from the Bolocam instrument. The catalog products are designed to facilitate follow-up observations of these relatively unstudied objects. The catalog is 98% complete from 0.4 Jy to 60 Jy over all object sizes for which the survey is sensitive (<3'.5). We find that the sources extracted can best be described as molecular clumps-large dense regions in molecular clouds linked to cluster Formation. We find that the flux density distribution of sources follows a power law with dN/dS alpha S(-2.4+/-0.1) and that the mean Galactic latitude for sources is significantly below the midplane: < b > = (-0 degrees.095 +/- 0 degrees.001).