AAS 207th Meeting, 8-12 January 2006
Session 192 Radio Astronomy Legacy Sky Surveys with the Arecibo L-band Feed Array (ALFA)
Special Session, Thursday, 10:00-11:30am, January 12, 2006, Delaware A

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[192.03] ALFALFA: a Legacy Extragalactic HI Survey

R. Giovanelli (Cornell University)

The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey aims to map 7000 square degreees of the high galactic latitude sky visible from Arecibo, providing an HI line spectral database covering the redshift range between -1600 km/s and 18,000 km/s with 5 km/s resolution. Exploiting the Arecibo telescope's large collecting area and small beam size, ALFALFA is specifically designed to probe the faint end of the HI mass function in the local universe and will provide a census of HI in the surveyed sky area to faint flux limits, making it especially useful in synergy with wide area surveys conducted at other wavelengths. ALFALFA will also provide the basis for studies of the dynamics of galaxies within the Local and nearby superclusters, will allow measurement of the HI diameter function, and enable a first wide-area blind search for local HI tidal features, HI absorbers at z<0.06 and OH megamasers in the redshift range 0.16


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