THE GALACTIC FAR-ULTRAVIOLET SKY AS SEEN BY FAUST - MODELING AND OBSERVATIONS

We test the model of the Galactic point source sky recently extended to the far-ultraviolet by Cohen (1994) against the set of Galactic far-ultraviolet point sources detected by the FAUST experiment. We find excellent agreement between the predicted (log N, log S) and the observed source counts for a range of Galactic directions observed by FAUST. At low galactic latitudes, we can directly infer the amount of interstellar extinction in a given direction associated with local molecular complexes, based on comparison of model calculations and FAUST star counts. The model can also be used to predict the statistical stellar content of any field. We compare the model predictions with the observations of Brosch et al. (1994), who have spectroscopically studied an optically identified complete sample of FAUST objects in a region near the north Galactic pole. We have used the model to determine that the contribution of far-ultraviolet stars fainter than 6 x 10(-14) ergs s-1 cm-2 angstrom-1 (the FAUST detection limit) is less than 1% of the diffuse sky brightness, and less than about 4% of the total point source flux.