Conclusions

The evidence presented above shows that Galactic HI occurs on all angular scales down to arcseconds. An all-sky survey of HI at an angular scale of arcmin would provide a rich source of data for many current areas of interest. These include the distribution and kinematics of HI in the Galactic disk, the structure of the nearby ISM from studies of intermediate and high latitude HI, HVCs and IVCs as well as tidal tails of our own Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds. The imminent availability of multibeam systems for HI observations makes such large-area surveys a realistic possibility.

The Jodrell Bank multibeam system at present under construction consists of 4 dual-polarized horns at the prime focus of the Lovell Telescope. Each of the 8 receiver systems will operate with a system noise of 25K and feed into a 1024 channel 2-level correlator spectrometer. The system will be used for Galactic and extragalactic studies.

© Copyright Astronomical Society of Australia 1997