X-ray properties of NGC 300 - I. Global properties of X-ray point sources and their optical counterparts

We present X-ray properties of NGC 300 point sources, extracted from 66 ks of XMM-Newton data taken in 2000 December and 2001 January. A total of 163 sources were detected in the energy range of 0.3 - 6 keV. We report on the global properties of the sources detected inside the D-25 optical disk, such as the hardness ratio and X-ray fluxes, and on the properties of their optical counterparts found in B, V, and R images from the 2.2m MPG/ESO telescope. Furthermore, we cross-correlate the X-ray sources with SIMBAD, the USNO-A2.0 catalog, and radio catalogues.