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Up: GRANAT/WATCH catalogue of

1. Introduction

From December 1989 to September 1994 the astrophysical observatory GRANAT performed pointed observations of different celestial regions. During that period, the
X-ray instrument WATCH, a part of the scientific payload of the observatory, was monitoring the whole of the sky. WATCH is uniquely capable of precisely measuring the celestial positions (the radius of the localization region is generally smaller than 1 deg at the 3tex2html_wrap_inline1105 confidence level) of short-lived hard X-ray sources, which include GRBs. Another feature of the instrument relevant to observations of GRBs is that its detectors are sensitive over an X-ray energy range that reaches down to tex2html_wrap_inline1107 keV, the domain where the properties of GRBs are known less than at higher energies.

In this paper, we present the catalogue of GRBs detected with WATCH in 1989-1994. For nearly half of the events we have been able to determine the location of the burst source on the celestial sphere. Earlier, a preliminary catalogue covering the WATCH observations carried out before October 1992 was compiled by Castro-Tirado (1994). The new catalogue has been updated mainly in the two aspects: 1) the bursts detected between October 1992 and September 1994 have been added, 2) more accurate positions have been determined for many of the previously catalogued events due to the use of more precise information on the spacecraft attitude and an improved model of the instrument.



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