The wide-field VLBA calibrator survey -- WFCS

Abstract

The paper presents the results of the largest to date VLBI absolute astrometry campaign of observations of 13,645 radio sources with the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). Of them, 7220 have been detected, including 6755 target sources that have never been observed with VLBI before. This makes the present VLBI catalogue the largest ever published. Positions of the target sources have been determined with the median uncertainty 1.7 mas, and 15,599 images of 7179 sources have been generated. Unlike to previous absolute radio astrometry campaigns, observations were made at 4.3 and 7.6 GHz simultaneously using a single wide-band receiver. Because of the fine spectral and time resolutions, the field of view was 4 to 8 arcminutes -- much greater than 10 to 20 arcseconds in previous surveys. This made possible to use input catalogues with low position accuracy and detect a compact component in extended sources. Unlike to previous absolute astrometry campaigns, both steep and flat spectrum sources were observed. The observations were scheduled in the so-called fill-in mode to fill the gaps between other high priority programs. That was achieved by development of the totally automatic scheduling procedure.

Accepted for publication by the Astronomical Journal; 32 pages, 20 figures, 10 table. Of them, 4 are machine readable. The machine readable tables can be found in the source of this submission as datafile7.txt, datafile8.txt, datafile9.txt, datafile10.txt . In order to get them, follow the link "Download other formats" and then "Download source"

References in corpus (11)

• DiFX: A software correlator for very long baseline interferometry using multi-processor computing environments
• The VLBA Imaging and Polarimetry Survey at 5 GHz
• The Sixth VLBA Calibrator Survey: VCS6
• The Fifth VLBA Calibrator Survey: VCS5
• The SFXC software correlator for Very Long Baseline Interferometry: Algorithms and Implementation
• The Micro-Arcsecond Scintillation-Induced Variability (MASIV) Survey II: The First Four Epochs
• VLBI-Gaia offsets favor parsec-scale jet direction in Active Galactic Nuclei
• On significance of VLBI/Gaia position offsets
• The LBA Calibrator Survey of southern compact extragalactic radio sources - LCS1
• New Associations of Gamma-Ray Sources from the Fermi Second Source Catalog
• VLBI imaging throughout the primary beam using accurate UV shifting

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