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Description
A catalog of 1789 radio sources which exhibit interplanetary scintillation (IPS) at 81.5 MHz is presented. The angular diameters of scintillating components in the range 0.2-2 arcsec are listed together with values of the scintillating flux density at a solar elongation of 90 deg. IPS selects those sources which are highly compact, such as pulsars and some unusual extragalactic sources, or those in which energy is being released from active beams in the outer lobes of intrinsically powerful radio galaxies and quasars. The survey was made with the 3.6-hectare array at Cambridge and covers the area of sky between declinations -10 deg and +83 deg at all values of right ascension. The array was operated as a north-south phase-switching interferometer observing sources near meridian transit. Sixteen declination beams were produced covering the observed declination range. The half-power width of a declination beam is 5.5 sec(52.16-DEC) degrees, where DEC is the declination of peak beam response. The half-power beam width in right ascension is 107 sec(delta) s for a source at declination delta. The faintest sources in the catalogue have scintillating flux densities of about 0.3 Jy rms at a solar elongation of 90 deg, and total flux densities of about 5 Jy at 81.5 MHz. The sensitivity of the survey is not uniform over the sky, being determined largely by the galactic background emission. The flux density corresponding to one source per beam area in this survey is about 2.3 Jy at 81.5 MHz so that confusion errors are likely to be significant for total flux density S <= 20 Jy.
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