The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey I: Design and First Results
Abstract
The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS) is the first large-area survey to be conducted with the full 36-antenna Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope. RACS will provide a shallow model of the ASKAP sky that will aid the calibration of future deep ASKAP surveys. RACS will cover the whole sky visible from the ASKAP site in Western Australia, and will cover the full ASKAP band of MHz. The RACS images are generally deeper than the existing NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) and Sydney University Molonglo Sky Survey (SUMSS) radio surveys and have better spatial resolution. All RACS survey products will be public, including radio images (with arcsecond resolution) and catalogues of about three million source components with spectral index and polarisation information. In this paper, we present a description of the RACS survey and the first data release of 903 images covering the sky south of declination made over a 288 MHz band centred at 887.5 MHz.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2012.00747,
title = {The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey I: Design and First Results},
author = {D. McConnell and C. L. Hale and E. Lenc and J. K. Banfield and George Heald and A. W. Hotan and James K. Leung and Vanessa A. Moss and Tara Murphy and Andrew O'Brien and Joshua Pritchard and Wasim Raja and Elaine M. Sadler and Adam Stewart and Alec J. M. Thomson and M. Whiting and James R. Allison and S. W. Amy and C. Anderson and Lewis Ball and Keith W. Bannister and Martin Bell and Douglas C. -J. Bock and Russ Bolton and J. D. Bunton and A. P. Chippendale and J. D. Collier and F. R. Cooray and T. J. Cornwell and P. J. Diamond and P. G. Edwards and N. Gupta and Douglas B. Hayman and Ian Heywood and C. A. Jackson and Bärbel S. Koribalski and Karen Lee-Waddell and N. M. McClure-Griffiths and Alan Ng and Ray P. Norris and Chris Phillips and John E. Reynolds and Daniel N. Roxby and Antony E. T. Schinckel and Matt Shields and Chenoa Tremblay and A. Tzioumis and M. A. Voronkov and Tobias Westmeier},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.00747},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
24 pages, 17 figures, 4 tables. For associated data see https://data.csiro.au/collections/domain/casdaObservation/results/PRAS110%20-%20The%20Rapid%20ASKAP%20Continuum