  The Northern Sky Optical Cluster Survey is a project to create an objective
catalog of galaxy clusters over the entire high-galactic-latitude Northern sky,
with well understood selection criteria. We use the object catalogs generated
from the Digitized Second Palomar Sky Survey (DPOSS, Djorgovski et al. 1999) as
the basis for this survey. We apply a color criterion to select against field
galaxies, and use a simple adaptive kernel technique to create galaxy density
maps, combined with the bootstrap technique to make significance maps, from
which density peaks are selected. This survey attempts to eliminate some of the
subjective criteria and assumptions of past surveys, including detection by eye
(Abell 1958, ACO 1989) and assumed luminosity functions and cluster profiles
(PDCS, Postman et al. 1995). We also utilize more information (especially
colors) than the most similar recent survey, the APM (Dalton et al. 1992). This
paper presents the details of our cluster detection technique, as well as some
initial results for two small areas totaling ~60 square degrees. We find a mean
surface density of ~1.5 clusters per square degree, consistent with the
detection of richness class 0 and higher clusters to z~0.3. In addition, we
demonstrate an effective photometric redshift estimator for our clusters.

Astrophysics