A SENSITIVE 1.5 GHZ RADIO SURVEY AROUND THE NORTH ECLIPTIC POLE

A 29.3 deg2 region surrounding the north ecliptic pole (NEP; alpha = 1 8 h00m, delta = +66-degrees 30') was mapped with the Very Large Array at 1.5 GHz to support the deepest portion of the ROSAT all-sky soft X- ray survey. The resulting VLA-NEP survey catalog contains 2435 radio s ources with flux densities in the range of 0.3-1000 mJy, including ove r 200 fainter than 1 mJy. The 28 fields of the inner 1-degrees .5 have noise levels sigma almost-equal-to 60 muJy, and the 85 fields centere d between 1-degrees .5 and 3-degrees .0 from the NEP have sigma almost -equal-to 120 muJy. The typical spatial resolution is 20'' HPBW, and m ost positions are accurate to <2''. Approximately 6% of the sources ar e found to be extended with size >30''. We have compared the VLA-NEP c atalog with four other radio catalogs made at lower resolution, as wel l as with the NASA Extragalactic Database and find counterparts for ap proximately 18% of the VLA-NEP objects. The normalized, differential r adio source count is in agreement with previous studies. Between 1 and 150 mJy the slope of the log N-log S relation is 0.68 +/- 0.03. The c atalog and related tables are available electronically.