Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• WOLLEBEN, M
• LANDECKER, T. L
• REICH, W
• WIELEBINSKI, R

Titel

An absolutely calibrated survey of polarized emission from the northern sky at 1.4 GHz : Observations and data reduction

Ist Teil von

• Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin), 2006-03, Vol.448 (1), p.411-424

Ort / Verlag

Les Ulis: EDP Sciences

Erscheinungsjahr

2006

Quelle

EZB-FREE-00999 freely available EZB journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• A new polarization survey of the northern sky at 1.41 GHz is presented. The observations were carried out using the 25.6 m telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Canada, with an angular resolution of 36'. The data are corrected for ground radiation to obtain Stokes U and Q maps on a well-established intensity scale tied to absolute determinations of zero levels, containing emission structures of large angular extent, with an rms noise of 12 mK. Survey observations were carried out by drift scanning the sky between -29' and +90' declination. The fully sampled drift scans, observed in steps of 0.25' to 62.5' in declination, result in a northern sky coverage of 41.7% of full Nyquist sampling. The survey surpasses by a factor of 200 the coverage, and by a factor of 5 the sensitivity, of the Leiden/Dwingeloo polarization survey that was until now the most complete large-scale survey. The temperature scale is tied to the EfTelsberg scale. Absolute zero-temperature levels are taken from the Leiden/Dwingeloo survey after rescaling those data by the factor of 0.94. The paper describes the observations, data processing, and calibration steps.