Fields

The fields for Herschel-ATLAS were chosen to be the best-studied large area fields at high Galactic latitudes, this way we can see through all the mess in the Galactic plane. Since Herschel-ATLAS is designed to have the maximum legacy value to astronomers, we have chosen three fields: one in the south, one in the north and one on the equator. All fields have minimal foreground Galactic debris and are therefore good targets for infrared-submillimetre surveys.   

The final survey consists of 4 areas:

Block 1. The North Galactic Plane (NGP): This is a rectangular block measuring 15 degrees by 10 degrees centred on RA=199.5, Dec=29 and rotated by 8 degrees clockwise.  The big white rectangle in the image to the left shows the outline of the NGP block.   

Blocks 2-4. Three GAMA fields: Designed to overlap with the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey. These fields are at RA 9hrs, 12hrs and 14.5hrs and each covers about 12 degs in RA and 3 degs in Dec.   The smaller white rectangles in the image above show where the Herschel tiles designed to cover the GAMA fields are located.  The GAMA fields are shown in magenta. The blue line highlights the area approximately covered by the 2dF survey. The cyan is the KIDS coverage and the yellow line is the area covered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The two red circles show the locations of the Coma and Virgo clusters of galaxies. The solid green lines are the co-ordinate grids in Ra and Dec, and the dotted green lines are co-ordinate grids in Ecliptic Latitude and Longitude.    

Blocks 5. South Galactic Plane (SGP):  This block measures approximately 290 sq deg and has coverage from the KIDS and VIKING surveys in the optical through to K band. It has spectroscopic redshifts from the 2dF survey. Colours are as above but with the magenta line showing the area covered by the Dark Energy Survey; the dotted green lines are Ecliptic Latitude and Longitude. In future this field have 1.4 GHz radio imaging from the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) with ASKAP (Norris et al. 2011) and is the target of a long term VISTA proposal to incease the imaging depth in the K band to K~22.7 across most of the area (SHARKS).