AKARI INFRARED CAMERA SURVEY OF THE LARGE MAGELLANIC CLOUD. I. POINT-SOURCE CATALOG

We present a near-to mid-infrared point-source catalog of five photometric bands at 3.2, 7, 11, 15, and 24 mu m for a 10 deg(2) area of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) obtained with the Infrared Camera on board the AKARI satellite. To cover the survey area the observations were carried out at three separate seasons from 2006 May to June, 2006 October to December, and 2007 March to July. The 10 sigma limiting magnitudes of the present survey are 17.9, 13.8, 12.4, 9.9, and 8.6 mag at 3.2, 7, 11, 15, and 24 mu m, respectively. The photometric accuracy is estimated to be about 0.1 mag at 3.2 mu m and 0.06-0.07 mag in the other bands. The position accuracy is 0 ''.3 at 3.2, 7, and 11 mu m and 1 ''.0 at 15 and 24 mu m. The sensitivities at 3.2, 7, and 24 mu m are roughly comparable to those of the Spitzer SAGE LMC point-source catalog, while the AKARI catalog provides the data at 11 and 15 mu m, covering the mid-infrared spectral range contiguously. Two types of catalog are provided: a Catalog and an Archive. The Archive contains all the detected sources, while the Catalog only includes the sources that have a counterpart in the Spitzer SAGE point-source catalog. The Archive contains about 650,000, 140,000, 97,000, 43,000, and 52,000 sources at 3.2, 7, 11, 15, and 24 mu m, respectively. Based on the catalog, we discuss the luminosity functions at each band, the color-color diagram, and the color-magnitude diagram using the 3.2, 7, and 11 mu m band data. Stars without circumstellar envelopes, dusty C-rich and O-rich stars, young stellar objects, and background galaxies are located at distinct regions in the diagrams, suggesting that the present catalog is useful for the classification of objects toward the LMC.