The Ultraviolet View of the Magellanic Clouds from GALEX: A First Look
  at the LMC Source Catalog
  The Galaxy Evolution Exporer (GALEX) has performed unprecedented imaging
surveys of the Magellanic Clouds (MC) and their surrounding areas including the
Magellanic Bridge (MB) in near-UV (NUV, 1771-2831\AA) and far-UV (FUV,
1344-1786\AA) bands at 5" resolution. Substantially more area was covered in
the NUV than FUV, particularly in the bright central regions, because of the
GALEX FUV detector failure. The 5$\sigma$ depth of the NUV imaging varies
between 20.8 and 22.7 (ABmag). Such imaging provides the first sensitive view
of the entire content of hot stars in the Magellanic System, revealing the
presence of young populations even in sites with extremely low star-formation
rate surface density like the MB, owing to high sensitivity of the UV data to
hot stars and the dark sky at these wavelengths.
  The density of UV sources is quite high in many areas of the LMC and SMC.
Crowding limits the quality of source detection and photometry from the
standard mission pipeline processing. We performed custom-photometry of the
GALEX data in the MC survey region ($<15^{\circ}$ from the LMC, $<10^{\circ}$
from the SMC). After merging multiple detections of sources in overlapping
images, the resulting catalog we have produced for the LMC contains nearly 6
million unique NUV point sources within 15$^{\circ}$ and is briefly presented
herein. This paper provides a first look at the GALEX MC survey and highlights
some of the science investigations that the entire catalog and imaging dataset
will make possible.
