The Completion and Release of the AAO/UKST Halpha Survey

Abstract

The AAO UK Schmidt Telescope (UKST) has just completed an Halpha survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Magellanic Clouds. The resultant map represents the last great photographic UKST survey product. A single-element interference filter of exceptional quality was used, the largest of its kind for astronomy. With fine-grained Tech-Pan film as the detector, an atlas with an unequalled combination of resolution, sensitivity and areal coverage has been created, superior to any equivalent optical line emission survey in our Galaxy. The Wide Field Astronomy Unit of the Institute for Astronomy Edinburgh hosts the survey data archive and is responsible for disseminating the data products to the community solely in digital form. As of July 2002, over 150 of the 233 survey fields are accessible on-line and the entire survey should be available early in 2003. A variety of scientific programmes for exploiting the survey are already underway and many more are anticipated now the digital survey data products are available.