South Pole studies of the anisotropy of the cosmic background radiation at one degree

Abstract

We have developed a system for making measurements of spatial fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation at 3 mm wavelength, on an angular scale of .5 to 5 degrees. The system includes a telescope with a Gaussian beam with a full width at half max (FWHM) of 20 to 50 arc‐minutes, an SIS (Superconductor‐Insulator‐Superconductor) coherent receiver operating around 90 GHz, and for ballon flights, a pointing system capable of 1 arc‐minute RMS stabilization. We report on results from ground based measurments made from the South Pole station during Decmeber, 1988.