VizieR Online Data Catalog: VLBI ICRF2 (Fey+, 2015)

We present the second realization of the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF2) at radio wavelengths using nearly 30 years of Very Long Baseline Interferometry observations. The earliest observations used are from 1979 August and the latest are from 2009 March. ICRF2 consists of accurate positions of 295 new "defining" sources and positions of 3119 additional compact radio sources to densify the frame. ICRF2 has more than 5 times as many sources as ICRF1 (Ma et al. 1997, cat. I/251), is roughly 5-6 times more accurate, and is nearly twice as stable in the orientation of its axes. (3 data files).