The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment. Difference Image Analysis of LMC and SMC Data. The Catalog

We present the first edition of a catalog of variable stars found in the Magellanic Clouds using OGLE-II data obtained during four years: 1997-2000. The catalog covers about 7 square degrees of the sky - 21 fields in the Large Magellanic Cloud and 11 fields in the Small Magellanic Cloud. All variables were found with the Difference Image Analysis (DIA) software. The catalog is divided into two sections. The DC section contains FITS reference images (obtained by co-adding 20 best frames for each field) and profile photometry (DoPhot) of all variable stars on those images. The AC section contains flux variations and magnitudes of detected variable stars obtained with DIA as well as with DoPhot. The errors of magnitude measurements are 0.005 mag for the brightest stars (I<16 mag) then grow to 0.08 mag at 19 mag stars and to 0.3 mag at 20.5 mag. Typically, there are about 400 I-band data points and about 30 V and B-band data points for more than 68 000 variables. The stars with high proper motions were excluded from this catalog and will be presented in a separate paper. A detailed analysis and classification of variable stars will be presented elsewhere. The catalog is available in electronic form via FTP and through WWW interface from the OGLE Internet archive. The FTP catalog contains approximately 2 GB of data.