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Description
We present the results from our deep (16x12hr) Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) observations of the approximately 7{deg}^2^ Bootes Deep Field, centered at 14h 32min 05.75s, 34{deg} 16' 47.5" (J2000.0). Our survey consists of 42 discrete pointings, with enough overlap to ensure a uniform sensitivity across the entire field, with a limiting sensitivity of 28{mu}Jy (1{sigma}_rms_). The catalog contains 3172 distinct sources, of which 316 are resolved by the 13"x27" beam. The Bootes field is part of the optical/near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy survey effort conducted at various institutions. The combination of these data sets and the deep nature of the radio observations will allow unique studies of a large range of topics including the redshift evolution of the luminosity function of radio sources, the K-z relation, the clustering environment of radio galaxies, the radio/far-infrared correlation for distant starbursts, and the nature of obscured radio-loud active galactic nuclei. The observations were carried out by the WSRT operating at 1.380GHz. The WSRT consists of 14 25m-telescopes arranged in a 2.7km east-west configuration. As the back end, we used the digital continuum back end with eight subbands of 10MHz bandwidth each. The smallest baseline (9-A) was set to 54m to limit shadowing at the expense of a reduction in large spatial structure sensitivity (~800" for this minimum baseline and frequency).
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