The Catalogue of Wide-Field Plate Archives is prepared in the Institute of Astronomy at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences within the activities of the IAU Commission 9 Working Group on Wide-Field Imaging, founded in 1991. The first version of the catalogue, called "List of Wide-Field Plate Archives" was published in Newsletter No. 2 of the Working Group on Wide-Field Imaging in 1992. Since 1998 the List was renaimed as a "Catalogue of Wide-Field Plate Archives"(CWFPA). It is based on information from the answers of two circular letters sent to more than 200 professional astronomical institutes and observatories. In difference from the list of photographic plate archives created by B. Hauck (1982, in Automated Data Retrieval in Astronomy, p. 217) and C. Jashek (1988, Bull. Inform. CDS, No. 34, p. 159; 1989, ibid., No. 36, p. 123) the present catalogue contains data for the existing wide-field plate archives separately for each observational instrument (reflector, astrograph, camera, Schmidt telescope, etc.) of the listed observatories/institutes. At presant the total sum of wide-field plates in the listed 345 archives is 2 096 146. As a rule, the archives of the telescopes with field size larger than 1 deg. are included in the cataolge.

The Catalogue of Wide-Field Plate Archives was distributed during the ESO/OAT International Workshop "Handling and Archiving Data from Ground-based Telescopes", Trieste, April 12-15, 1993, the IAU Symposium 161 "Astronomy from Wide-Field Imaging", Potsdam, August 23-27, 1993, the Colloquium 148 of the IAU "Future Utilization of the Schmidt Telescopes", Bandung, March 7-11, 1994, the XXII^nd General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in the Hague, August 15-27, 1994, 2^-nd Astronomical Conference of the Helenic Astronomical Society, Thessaloniki, June 29 - July 1, 1995, JENAM'95 "Progress in European Astrophysics", Catania, September 25-29, 1995, the International Conference on Wide-Field Spectroscopy, Athens, May 20-24, 1996, the Colloquium "International Cooperation in Dissemination of the Astronomical Data", Pulkovo, July 2-9, 1996 , the IAU Symposium 179 "New Horizons from Multiwavelength Sky Surveys", August 26-30, 1996, the XXIII General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Kyoto, August 18-30, 1997 and the the IAU XXIV General Assembly in Manchester, August 2000.

The old version (6.1-7.0)- from January 2014 was updated and corrected version of the Catalogue. The successive columns of the Catalogue contained:

1. Wide-Field Plate Database instrument identifier (instrument code). Star simbol(s) next to the identifier show which plate catalogues are included so far in the WFPDB or are in preparation to be included: * - at disposal in SSADC, not yet converted in computer-readable form, ** - in preparation in SSADC, converted in computer readable form, *** - included in the WFPDB and avialable on-line.

2-3. Location of the plate archive: town (site), country, 2b-Archive code

4-6. Observatory: name,display name(for Astroweb), site, country, 4c -Site code

7. Minor Planet Center observatory code (http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/lists/ObsCodesF.html)

8. Time zone (main)

9. Observatory longitude (deg, min)

10. Observatory latitude (deg, min)

11. Observatory altitude (m)

12. Clear aperture of the telescope (m)

13. Diameter of telescope mirror (m)

14. Focal length of the telescope (m)

15. Plate scale (arcsec/mm)

16. Instrument type: Ast-astrograph, Cam-camera, FEC-fisheyecamera, Men-meniscus,

RCr-Ritchey-Chretien, Rfl-reflector, Rfr- refractor, Sch-Schmidt

17. Field angular dimension (deg)

18-19. Years of telescope operation (from-to)

20. Symbol "F" for "film", blank for "plate"

21. Number of direct plates

22. Form of the archive data for the direct plates: T - printed table form, C - computer-readable form, TC - in preparation in computer-readable form

23. Number of objective prism plates

24. Form of the archive data for the objective prism plates: same as for column 21

25. Quality of the plate archive: A - very good, B - good, D - distributed

26. Astronomer in charge

Up to the present time 509 wide-field plate archives with about of 640 000 plates have been included or are in preparation to be included in the Wide-Field Plate Database (CWFPA Version 7.1, November, 2015, Tsvetkova, K.). An on-line access to the WFPDB v.1 is now possible via VizieR catalogue browser in CDS-Strasbourg at http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/cats/VI.htx (catalogue number VI/90).

The world-wide distribution of the wide-field telescopes is shown in Fig. 1. (JPG, 79 kB) .

We would like to express our deep thanks to all astronomers who sent us the data for the plate archives of their institutes/observatories. We hope that the use of this Catalogue as well as of the data from the Wide-Field Plate Database will encourage other colleagues to start preparing their plate catalogues and to give due attention to the importance of archiving work in astronomy.

We would appreciate all remarks, comments and collaboration in order to make the present data for the astronomical community complete and accurate to the most.

January 1st, 2003, Sofia, Updated: March 6th, 2016, Sofia

Dr. Milcho Tsvetkov

Project Manager
Wide-Field Plate Database
Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, BAS
8 Acad. Georgi Bonchev Str.
BG-1113, Sofia, Bulgaria
E-mail: milcho.tsvetkov"@"gmail.com