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Session 55 - New Digital Sky Surveys.
Display session, Wednesday, June 10
Atlas Ballroom,
We present results on the SMC from the first full season of the Michigan/CTIO Magellanic Cloud Emission-Line Survey, being carried out from the 0.6m Curtis Schmidt telescope at CTIO\@. The 1\fdg1 square field of the 2K STIS CCD on the Schmidt makes digital surveys of both Clouds a practicable goal. Images are being obtained in H\alpha, [S\thinspace \scriptsize II] \lambda\lambda\; 6717,6731, and [O\thinspace \scriptsize III] \lambda\; 5007, plus red and green continuum bands for star subtraction. During the 1996-97 season, a 3\fdg5 \times 4\arcdeg \ region encompassing most of the SMC was covered by observing 34 overlapping fields in all five wavelength bands. These data are being assembled into large mosaic images which reveal the rich variety of nebulosity in the SMC in unprecedented detail. These data will eventually provide definitive samples of the active ISM on scales including superbubbles, wind-blown bubbles, supernova remnants, H\thinspace \scriptsize II regions, and planetary nebulae.
Combining the images into seamless mosaics covering such a wide field, especially at high declination, presents a challenge. We will describe techniques we have developed or adapted to maintain an astrometric accuracy of 1\arcsec\ over the entire field, avoid significant degradation of resolution, and achieve near-uniform sky levels across the field.
This work has been supported in part by the NSF through grants AST-9618465 and AST-9530747, and by the W.M. Keck Foundation through the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium.
