by Ian Heywood (CASS) and ASKAP team

This image shows fifty square degrees of sky in the constellation of Tucana, as seen by the ASKAP prototype BETA at 711 – 1015 MHz. The image was produced as part of the BETA commissioning in order to demonstrate the use of the interleaving technique to achieve uniform sensitivity over a large sky area. The beams are arranged in a 3 x 3 square configuration, separated by 1.46 degrees, and during each observation the array nods between two pointing positions. A pair of interleaved positions, four pointings in total, were used to form the above image, using approximately 50 hours of telescope time. The image reaches a (1-sigma) depth of 0.5 mJy, and contains about 2300 sources above 5-sigma. Keep checking the Daily Image to see the bigger and better successor to this observation!