A Preliminary Look at the Construction of the 4HWC Catalog Using a Multi-Source Fit Method

Over the lifetime of the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory three Very High Energy (VHE) source catalogs have been produced. Growing from a preliminary catalog with only a handful of significant sources to the most recent 3HWC catalog with 65 VHE sources, each new catalog represents an improvement in our ability to resolve VHE sources. Here I will present on the planned 4HWC catalog which incorporates several major improvements over earlier catalog constructions. An additional 798 days of data between the creation of the 3HWC and 4HWC along with improved event reconstruction algorithms provides a much more sensitive data set to serve as a foundation for the catalog. Furthermore, a switch from the previously used method which relied upon searching for isolated maxima in the data maps and fitting a small number of predetermined fixed source models to a multi-source fit method which fits large regions of interest using several source morphologies and spectral models inspired by the Fermi extended MSF method should result in a much more comprehensive source list. I will present some preliminary results of the automated MSF method in several benchmark regions in HAWC data.