IAU01874
Presentation type requested: ORAL
"COSMIC WINDOWS" SURVEYS
J. J Condon
National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Astronomical observations are degraded by dust and gas between the source and the telescope, especially in the far-infrared, ultraviolet, and X-ray portions of the spectrum. Such observations must be made from space, where they are still affected by the interstellar medium of our Galaxy. Fortunately the interstellar medium is quite patchy, with several ``cosmic windows'' covering about 100 square degress of sky having exceptionally low interstellar extinction and cirrus emission. Since the universe is nearly isotropic, these areas contain representative samples of cosmologically distant sources and will be the focus of most deep multiwavelength studies such as SWIRE, GALEX, and XMM-LSS. Complementary optical and radio surveys provide essential source identifications, redshifts, morphologies, and continuum spectra. The first VLA survey of this type complements the SIRTF First-Look Survey (FLS) covering ~5 square deg in order to characterize the extragalactic infrared sky two orders of magnitude deeper than the IRAS survey. Most of the far-infrared sources will be star-forming galaxies obeying the very tight far-infrared/radio correlation and will be continuum radio sources with S>100 microJy at 1.4 GHz. This radio survey (see http://www.cv.nrao.edu/sirtf_fls/) is being used to select and identify most of the SIRTF FLS source population before launch.
Cotton W. D, Heckman T. M, Lonsdale C. J, Martin C. D, Oliver S. J, Roettgering H. J, Schiminovich D. , Smith H. E, Yin Q. F
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