Molonglo deep survey at 843 MHZ

Abstract

The Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope has been used for a deep survey of 25 southern fields of about 1° diameter. All these fields have been observed on several occasions in 120×12-hour sessions during 1983 - 85. Radio sources have thus been detected down to a few millijansky at 843 MHz in 20 deg2 of sky from these observations and in a few selected fields, it has been possible to reach a detection limit of 1 mJy. The first results on the source counts and optical identifications are presented. By supplementing these data with some existing observations of stronger radio sources, the authors have been able to obtain source counts at 843 MHz for the entire range of flux densities above 1 mJy.