Daily Image
29-01-2013
The LOFAR view of the Galactic foreground toward the Fan region.
| Submitter: | Marco Iacobelli |
| Description: | The LOFAR telescope was pointed toward the spatially extended and synchrotron bright Fan region on Jan 7th 2012 in the framework of the commissioning activities of the LOFAR Magnetism Key Science Project (MKSP). As a result of the 12 hours pointing, this widefield image is the deepest portrait available of this sky region around 160 MHz, with a noise level of 0.4 mJy per beam. It covers about 17x17 sq. deg. at an angular resolution of about 1 arcmin. Within the LOFAR main beam several hundreds of background extragalactic sources are visible and many of them have a complex spatial morphology as shown in the insets. Furthermore a faint and diffuse radio continuum is also detected, constituting the first LOFAR imaging of the Galactic synchrotron foreground emission. The position of some major features out of the LOFAR main beam, i.e. the Galactic plane direction and the W3/W4/W5 HII region complex toward the Perseus arm are also indicated in the map with a dotted line and ellipse, respectively. A scientific publication based on this LOFAR data is in preparation. |
| Copyright: | Marco Iacobelli |
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