THE AUTOMATED PLATE SCANNER CATALOG OF THE PALOMAR SKY SURVEY .1. SCANNING PARAMETERS AND PROCEDURES

We have just completed scanning glass copies of the blue and red plate s in the original Palomar Observatory-National Geographic Sky Survey ( POSS I) for the fields with b greater-than-or-equal-to \20-degrees\. A ll of the detected images are being cataloged with positions, shapes, magnitudes, and colors. The stellar and nonstellar images are separate d using a neural network approach. We estimate that there will be near ly a billion stellar objects and image data for several million galaxi es in the finished data base. The data base, including the cataloged o bjects and the pixel data for the nonstellar images, will be available to the scientific community on-line via Internet. This paper is the f irst of a series describing the APS Catalog of the POSS I. In this fir st paper we describe the operation of the APS and the scanning procedu res and parameters of the POSS I.