The AAO/UKST H galactic plane survey

Deep H Schmidt images will provide a wealth of new information on large- and small-scale low-brightness features. Two issues are of utmost importance to reveal faint objects with a brightness below the night sky: high quality plates with a uniform plate background, and monitoring of the sky-brightness with a dedicated photometer. These two conditions have become standard only at the AAO/UK Schmidt telescope. In addition, in this team there has been a continuous effort over the last two decades to push Schmidt photography to new limits. The AAO/UK Schmidt Telescope Unit is therefore excellently suited to conduct such a survey.

A few additional points may be of interest for the H galactic plane survey: (1) Exposures in the H-continuum filter will be important to separate the dust scattered light component and to reveal true faint H features. (2) Excursion to high galactic latitude fields will be interesting. Not only for studying high-latitude clouds (see also Larson 1998), but also for deep extragalactic studies since there will be less confusion with unrelated fore- and background H emission. Last but not least, photography remains an art. Besides digitisation of the full plates with SuperCOSMOS (see MacGillivray 1998), there will remain an important role for photographic amplification techniques (see Malin 1998). In particular since it is a powerful and fast method to reveal new faint objects and to make breathtaking astronomical images.

© Copyright Astronomical Society of Australia 1997