An XUV Survey with the Wide Field Camera on ROSAT

Abstract

The wide field camera (WFC) on board ROSAT has carried out an all sky survey in the previously unexplored XUV waveband (67–200 A), in parallel with the x-ray survey (6–120 A) carried out with the main telescope on ROSAT. This paper describes the processing and analysis of calibration and sky survey data (carried out at five consortium institutes in the UK), plus an overview of survey results. The XUV survey was carried out in two filters, S1A (67–137 A) and S2A (112–200 A), by interchanging filters once a day. The WFC has a 5° field-of-view (fov). In survey mode a strip of 360° in ecliptic latitude by 5° wide is scanned once every satellite orbit round the earth (~ 96 minutes), and this strip moves ~ 1° per day around the ecliptic. Thus the interchange of filters at a rate of once per day is sufficiently rapid as to produce survey sky coverage, without gaps, in each filter. The WFC is a grazing incidence telescope, with a microchannel plate imaging detector. For descriptions of the instruments see e.g. Sims et al 1990, Barstow and Sansom 1990.