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Description
The Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty centimeters (FIRST) began in 1993. It uses the VLA (Very Large Array, a facility of the National Radio Observatory (NRAO)) at a frequency of 1.4GHz, and it is slated to 10,000 deg^2^ of the North and South Galactic Caps, to a sensitivity of about 1mJy with an angular resolution of about 5". The images produced by an automated mapping pipeline have pixels of 1.8arcsec, a typical rms of 0.15mJy, and a resolution of 5arcsec; the images are available on the Internet (see the FIRST home page at http://sundog.stsci.edu/ for details). The source catalogue is derived from the images. This version (2003 Apr 11) of the FIRST Survey is derived from the data taken from 1993 through September 2002, and contains about 811,000 sources covering 8422 square degrees in the North Galactic cap and 611 square degrees in the South Galactic cap. The FIRST survey is now substantially complete; the planned additions include a version with improved sidelobe flagging and deeper observations of the southern equatorial strip (with variability information), and maybe a small amount of additional data to fill holes within the surveyed area.
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