The SCUBA-2 Ambitious Sky Survey: a catalogue of beam-sized sources in the Galactic longitude range 120° to 140°

The SCUBA-2 Ambitious Sky Survey (SASSy) is composed of shallow 850-µm imaging using the Sub-millimetre Common-User Bolometer Array 2 (SCUBA-2) on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. Here we describe the extraction of a catalogue of beam-sized sources from a roughly 120 deg2 region of the Galactic plane mapped uniformly (to an rms level of about 40 mJy), covering longitude 120° l b| IRAS Point Source Catalogue, to determine which sources discovered in this field might be new, and hence potentially cold regions at an early stage of star formation

An Unbiased Survey of 500 Nearby Stars for Debris Disks: A JCMT Legacy Program

We present the scientific motivation and observing plan for an upcoming detection survey for debris disks using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. The SCUBA-2 Unbiased Nearby Stars (SUNS) Survey will observe 500 nearby main sequence and sub-giant stars (100 of each of the A, F, G, K and M spectral classes) to the 850 micron extragalactic confusion limit to search for evidence of submillimeter excess, an indication of circumstellar material. The survey distance boundaries are 8.6, 16.5, 22, 25 and 45 pc for M, K, G, F and A stars, respectively, and all targets lie between the declinations of -40 deg to 80 deg. In this survey, no star will be rejected based on its inherent properties: binarity, presence of planetary companions, spectral type or age. This will be the first unbiased survey for debris disks since IRAS. We expect to detect ~125 debris disks, including ~50 cold disks not detectable in current shorter wavelength surveys. A substantial amount of complementary data will be required to constrain the temperatures and masses of discovered disks. High resolution studies will likely be required to resolve many of the disks. Therefore, these systems will be the focus of future observational studies using a variety of observatories to characterize their physical properties. For non-detected systems, this survey will set constraints (upper limits) on the amount of circumstellar dust, of typically 200 times the Kuiper Belt mass, but as low as 10 times the Kuiper Belt mass for the nearest stars in the sample (approximately 2 pc).Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures (3 color), accepted by the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacifi

Astronomy for the Blind and Visually Impaired: An Introductory Lesson

This article describes an introductory astronomy lesson for blind and visually impaired people. The lesson was conducted successfully and included hands-on activities. Beginning with the Solar System and concluding with the cosmological perspective, the lesson gave the participants a feel for the scales of sizes and distances in the universe and for its number of galaxies and stars

A pilot study for the SCUBA-2 'All-Sky' survey

The definitive version can be found at : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ Copyright Royal Astronomical SocietyWe have carried out a pilot study for the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array 2 (SCUBA-2) 'All-Sky' Survey (SASSy), a wide and shallow mapping project at 850 mu m, designed to find rare objects, both Galactic and extragalactic. Two distinct sets of exploratory observations were undertaken and used to test the SASSy approach and data-reduction pipeline. The first was a 0 degrees.5 x 0 degrees.5 map around the nearby galaxy NGC 2559. The galaxy was easily detected at 156 mJy, but no other convincing sources are present in the map. Comparison with other galaxies with similar wavelength coverage indicates that NGC 2559 has relatively warm dust. The second observations cover 1 deg(2) around the W5-E H II region. As well as diffuse structure in the map, a filtering approach was able to extract 27 compact sources with signal-to-noise ratio greater than 6. By matching with data at other wavelengths we can see that the SCUBA-2 data can be used to discriminate the colder cores. Together these observations show that the SASSy project will be able to meet its original goals of detecting new bright sources which will be ideal for follow-up observations with other facilities.Peer reviewe