APEX Southern Gould's Belt proposal

A proposal to map southern nearby star-forming clouds in the submm with APEX, to complement the Spitzer Gould's Belt Legacy survey, Spitzer C2D, and the JCMT Gould's Belt Legacy survey, and Herschel. This page is in the process of moving to the TWiki

Targets

The provisional target list comprises southern clouds within 500pc which have been or will be covered by Spitzer or Herschel: Chameleon, Lupus, Coalsack, and Musca (any others?). The highest priority are the Av>3 areas as these will be covered by Spitzer.

The remaining area here marked by question marks - covered by C2D - is under 4 sq. deg. bringing the total to around 11 sq. deg.

Extinction maps (FITS) (Cambresy or Dobashi)

Unapologetically cribbed from the Spitzer WIKI

Proposal

The ESO call for proposals (P79) will be the end of September 06 for the period Apr-Sept 07. If (as almost certain) we ask for more than 100 hours over 1 or 2 years, then we qualify as a Large Program. Collaborators at MPIfR and in Sweden may also contribute some time to make this a joint proposal. There may also be a small amount of time available for Science Verification of LABOCA in September 06, with a likely call July 06.

For an ESO Large Program we have 3 pages to cover science and technical case (not including figures) plus 2 pages of attachments (figures and refs?) - see the last Call for Proposals (P78) for guidelines. Large programmes are required to provide data and data products to the archive by the time of publication.

The aim is to have a draft proposal together by mid-July from which targets can be selected for the science verification phase. The full proposal will then be submitted September.

LABOCA sensitivities

The design (as yet untested) LABOCA NEFD is 125 mJy/ sqrt(s) and the FOV is 10' (8' forthe inner square), resulting in the following mapping speeds

Data processing and archiving

If we can ultimately make the maps and data products publicly available then this project will have legacy value to the star formation community. Archiving of the raw data is automatic through ESO and it looks like for a Large Program this is also true for reduced data and data products (format?) We need a plan for data reduction. Can we use elements of the SCUBA-2 pipeline to extract source catalogues etc.?

To do:

• Fill in remaining cloud Av>3 areas
• Decide on target sensitivity and area for each cloud
• Science case
• Data reduction strategy

If you are interested in contributing to this project or have information to add to this page, contact Jenny Hatchell hatchell[at]astro.ex.ac.uk