School of Physics,
University of Sydney
Astrophysics Department:
Wide Field Project
Since 1983, the Department's radio telescope MOST (the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope) has spent 12 hours of almost every night making a radio image at 843 MHz of an area of sky about 70 arcmin in diameter (five times the area of the moon). These observations have been made in selected areas of special interest which now amount to about 20% of the southern sky with concentrations along the Galactic plane and in the Magellanic Clouds.
In 1995, a major enhancement to the performance of the MOST was completed enabling each 12 hour observation to image an area more than five times larger. Much of 1996 was devoted to the commissioning of this wide field-of-view facility. The wide-field system now routinely produces images of 160 arcmin diameter with noise levels of the order of 1 mJy. Further technical progress on the MOST includes the installation of new amplifiers developed by Ralph Davison and tests of a new local oscillator system for delivering reference radio signals of high stability to 88 points along the 1.6km arm of the telescope.
The MOST is supported by grants from the Australian Research Council. The current ARC large grant was awarded to Lawrence Cram, Elaine Sadler and Dick Hunstead for three years to exploit the new wide field of the MOST in studies of extragalactic radio sources. The result of these studies will be the Sydney University Molonglo Sky Survey (SUMSS).
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