Intracluster stars—stars outside of individual galaxies—are a sensitive measure of the poorly understood processes of galactic mergers, cluster accretion, and tidal stripping that occur in galaxy clusters. In particular, intracluster planetary nebulae are a useful probe of intracluster light as a whole. We present a catalog of 318 intracluster planetary nebula candidates in the nearby Virgo Cluster of galaxies, taken with the Kitt Peak National Observatory 4 m telescope. We detail the automated detection routines developed to search for these candidates and discuss the routines' strengths and weaknesses. We discuss the importance of contamination in the catalog, and the likely causes. We present magnitudes and positions of these candidates, suitable for spectroscopic follow-up observations. Analyses of these candidates are presented in other papers of this series.
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Feldmeier et al. (2003) studied this question.
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