A preliminary reference catalog of the infrared sources

Recently, a reference catalog was compiled at the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO), giving 33,678 star identifications of the IRAS Point Source Catalog (PSC) with optical positions of these stars from four astrometric catalogs: FK5 and its Extension, the International Reference Stars Catalog (IRS) and the Astrographic Catalog Reference Stars Catalog (ACRS). The resulting catalog is inhomogeneous in accuracy and, like its optical analogs, can be divided into two hierarchical parts. The first of them is the IR analog of FK5, and the second one is of lower accuracy and based on the IRS and ACRS stars. The last one can be considered as the analog of a photographic reference catalog. Therefore, the USNO IR catalog has been divided into these two parts: the first one contains 1,229 basic and 1,352 supplementary FK5 stars, and the second one contains 31,097 stars from IRS and ACRS. A similar step towards such a hierarchical coordinate system of IR sources has been made independently at the Main Astronomical Observatory at Golosiiv where a special IR database was constructed. In this report we describe this database and compare our preliminary coordinate system of IR sources with the USNO catalog. (Abstract only). (Author)