This paper presents the complete list of objects contained in the IRAS Revised Bright Galaxy Sample (RBGS), a flux-limited sample of all extragalactic objects brighter than 5.24 Jy at 60 µm, covering the entire sky surveyed by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS ; Neugebauer et al. 1984) at Galactic latitude |b| > 5°. The RBGS replaces the earlier IRAS Bright Galaxy Samples (BGS1 + BGS2), which were compiled using the IRAS Point Source Catalog (PSC: 1988) along with other intermediate releases of the IRAS data products and are therefore now out of date with the more accurate "Pass 3" calibration 7 adopted for the final release of the IRAS Level1 Archive.
The RBGS objects are the brightest 60 µm sources in the extragalactic infrared sky, and as such they remain the best sources for studying the infrared emission processes in galaxies and for comparison with extragalactic observations at other wavelengths. In this regard the RBGS can be considered the infrared equivalent of the 3CR survey of extragalactic radio sources. Most sources in the RBGS have extended IRAS flux densities that are underestimated by measurements in the IRAS PSC and in the Faint Source Catalog (FSC: Moshir et al. 1992), because the IRAS catalogs are the result of point-source filtering. Therefore, the RBGS should be the reference of choice for accurate IRAS fluxes and infrared luminosities of galaxies in the local Universe.
In this paper we report revised 12 µm, 25 µm, 60 µm and 100 µm total flux densities for all 629 infrared sources in the RBGS. Section 2 describes the methods used to select the objects. Details of the IRAS data processing are deferred to the Appendix. Section 3 presents the summary data for the RBGS objects, including the revised IRAS flux measurements, source size information, and derived infrared luminosities. Also included is an atlas of images from the Digitized Sky Survey with overlays of the IRAS position uncertainty ellipse and annotated scale bars; this is intended as a reference to visualize the optical morphology of the infrared source in context with the angular and metric size of each object, and more importantly, in the case of confused or double sources, to quickly see how large the IRAS position offset may be from the optical sources. Section 4 is a discussion of the general properties of the RBGS which includes a comparison of the revised measurements with those published previously, and a summary of the sky coverage, number counts, infrared colors, and infrared luminosity function. A companion paper (Surace, Sanders & Mazzarella 2003) provides High Resolution (HIRES) processing of ~ 20% of the RBGS sources where it was thought that enhanced resolution might provide better source positions, or in the case of close galaxy pairs, allow deconvolution of the individual components.
7 "Pass 3" refers to the final calibration adopted for the archived IRAS data by the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) in 1990. Details of the calibration methods for each of the IRAS infrared bands, and the various IRAS catalogs and atlases can be found in the Explanatory Supplement to the IRAS Faint Source Survey (Moshir et al. 1992). Back.