A Pilot Study for the SCUBA-2 'All-Sky' Survey

TL;DR

This pilot study demonstrates that the SCUBA-2 'All-Sky' Survey can effectively detect rare Galactic and extragalactic objects, validating its approach and data pipeline for future large-scale mapping.

Contribution

The paper presents the first exploratory observations for SASSy, testing its data reduction pipeline and demonstrating its capability to detect both diffuse and compact sources at 850 microns.

Findings

NGC 2559 detected with warm dust characteristics

27 compact sources identified in W5-E region

SCUBA-2 data can discriminate colder cores from other sources

Abstract

We have carried out a pilot study for the SCUBA-2 'All-Sky' Survey, SASSy, a wide and shallow mapping project at 850 microns, designed to find rare objects, both Galactic and extragalactic. Two distinct sets of exploratory observations were undertaken, and used to test the SASSy approach and data reduction pipeline. The first was a 0.5 by 0.5 degrees map around the nearby galaxy NGC 2559. The galaxy was easily detected at 156 mJy, but no other convincing sources are present in the map. Comparison with other galaxies with similar wavelength coverage indicates that NGC 2559 has relatively warm dust. The second observations cover 1 square degree around the W5-E HII region. As well as diffuse structure in the map, a filtering approach was able to extract 27 compact sources with signal-to-noise greater than 6. By matching with data at other wavelengths we can see that the SCUBA-2 data can be used to discriminate the colder cores. Together these observations show that the SASSy project will be able to meet its original goals of detecting new bright sources which will be ideal for follow-up observations with other facilities.