StrayCats II: A catalog of NuSTAR Stray Light Observations
Description
In addition to being the first focusing hard X-ray space observatory, NuSTAR is also sensitive to sources from 1- to 3-degrees from the optical axis that pass through the telescope structure to shine on the detectors. When a bright source falls into this region of the sky, a characteristic stray light pattern is observed on the detectors and the instrument can be used as a classical collimated instrument. For bright (mostly Galactic) X-ray sources, this provides additional data suitable both for spectroscopy (including above the fiducial 78 keV cutoff caused by the NuSTAR optics) and timing/variability studies. Most of these sources have multiple epochs spanning a variety of source behaviors. StrayCats v1 included all SL sources through mid-2021. StrayCats v2 (released May 2022) updates this catalog through Jan 2022 and now includes long-term lightcurves, hardness ratios, and source extraction regions for most entries in the catalog.
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StrayCatsII.pdf
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