  We are conducting an effort to catalog all sources detected in the digitized
POSS-II (DPOSS). This is now becoming an international collaboration including
Caltech and the Observatories of Rome and Naples (project CRONA). There are
also ongoing extensive CCD calibration efforts at Palomar. The resulting
Palomar-Norris Sky Catalog (PNSC) is expected to contain > 5 x 10^7 galaxies,
and > 2 x 10^9 stars, in 3 colors (photographic JFN bands, calibrated to CCD
gri system), down to the limiting magnitude equivalent of B approx 22 mag. The
star-galaxy classification is accurate to 90 - 95% down to the equivalent of B
approx 21 mag. The catalog will be made available to the community via computer
networks or other suitable media, probably in installments, as soon as
scientific validation and quality checks are completed and the funding allows
it. Analysis and manipulation software will also be freely available. A great
variety of scientific projects will be possible with this vast new data base,
including studies of the large-scale structure in the universe, the Galactic
structure, automatic optical identifications of sources from radio through
x-ray bands, generation of objectively defined catalogs of clusters and groups
of galaxies, generation of statistically complete catalogs of galaxies to be
used in future redshift surveys, searches for high-redshift quasars and other
active objects, searches for variable or extreme-color objects, etc. We have
already started work on a number of such projects, and we summarize briefly
some of the results obtained to date.
