SIRTF FLS: VLA Survey
- J. J. Condon, W. D. Cotton, and Q. F. Yin
- National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 520 Edgemont Road,
Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA
- G. Helou, D. L. Shupe, B. T. Soifer, and L. J. Storrie-Lombardi
- SIRTF Science Center, California Institute of Technology,
Mail Code 314-6, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- M. W. Werner
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of
Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
The Space InfraRed Telescope Facility (SIRTF) will conduct a First-Look
Survey (FLS) covering
about 5 square degrees centered on J2000 RA = 17h 18m, DEC = +59d 30'
in order to characterize the extragalactic infrared sky two
orders-of-magnitude deeper than the IRAS survey. We expect that most
of the FLS far-infrared sources will be star-forming galaxies obeying
the very tight far-infrared/radio correlation and will be continuum
radio sources with flux densities S > 100 microJy at 1.4 GHz.
Conversely, radio sources stronger than about 100 microJy are usually
powered by star-forming galaxies, plus some active galactic nuclei,
and most should be detectable by the SIRTF FLS. Thus a sensitive
radio survey can be used to select and identify most of the SIRTF FLS
source population before launch. We used the B configuration of the
VLA to image the FLS area at 1.4 GHz with 23 microJy/beam rms noise,
5'' resolution, and < 0.5 arcsec rms position uncertainties. The
resulting radio image and catalog of 3565 radio components brighter
than 115 microJy/beam have been released via the web to expedite
follow-up optical identification and spectroscopy. For
a detailed description of the FLS/VLA survey, see
the paper
Condon, J. J., Cotton, W. D., Helou, G., Shupe, D. L., Soifer, B. T.,
Storrie-Lombardi, L. J., & Werner, W. M, 2003, AJ, submitted.
If you publish results based on the FLS/VLA survey, please
reference this paper.
The sky coverage of the final VLA image, a mosaic constructed from 35
pointings, is shown
here as a border with dots indicating the pointing centers. Use
the postage
stamp server to get convenient FITS-format images, contour plots,
or jpeg images of selected regions in the VLA image. The catalog
browser returns lists of sources in selected regions.
Alternatively, you can copy the large (8192 X 8192 pixels) gzipped
(23830475 bytes) FITS-format
image image of the entire field or the entire source catalog as a FITS
binary table and software. (Reminder: shift-click will
generally force your browser to save the requested image to a file
rather than displaying it in a text window.)
The FITSview
family of FITS image viewers is available for a variety of computer
systems. For a short discussion of installing external viewers for FITS
files click here.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is operated
by Associated Universities, Inc., under cooperative agreement with the
National Science Foundation
For more information about the SIRTF FLS/VLA:
Modified on Friday, 31-Jan-2003 14:56:44 EST
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