4 Conclusion

COMPTEL has opened the MeV gamma-ray band (0.75 to 30 MeV) as a new window to astronomy. The data from five years of COMPTEL observations provided the first COMPTEL source catalogue. It is largely restricted to previously published results, and contains firm as well as marginal detections of continuum and line emitting sources, and presents upper limits for various types of objects. The number of most significant detections (> 3$\sigma$) are 32 for steady sources and 31 for gamma-ray bursters (see Table 13). Six of the listed sources extend over larger areas. Their extent may actually be due to a larger number of so far unresolved point sources. This may be especially true for the Cygnus region in 1.809 MeV, for GRO J1823-12 and for the two HVC complexes. A second COMPTEL source catalogue will be produced after a more accurate modelling of the diffuse interstellar emission has become possible.

Acknowledgements

The COMPTEL project is supported by the German government through DLR grant 50 Q 9096 8, by NASA under contract NAS5-26645, and by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO. The authors acknowledge the efforts of M. Chupp, H. Haber, J. Englhauser and R. Georgii in implementing the various tables.