The RAVE pilot survey with 6dF

Survey Details

RAVE (RAdial VelocityExperiment) is a programme to conduct an all-sky survey of the radial velocities (to ~1 km/s), metallicities and abundance ratios of some 50 million stars, complete to V = 16. It will use the UK Schmidt Telescope, together with a northern counterpart, and is being conducted in two phases (the first of which is subdivided):

Phase 0 (Apr-Dec 2003) using 7 bright nights per lunation with observing effort provided by AAO;
Phase I (Jan 2004–Jun 2005) using at least 7 bright nights per lunation with observing effort paid for by the RAVE consortium;
Phase II (2006–2010) using all UKST time with both observing and engineering effort paid for by the RAVE consortium.

Phases 0/I will measure velocities and metallicities for ~10⁵ stars visible from the southern hemisphere with 9<I<12 using 6dF, while Phase II will measure the brightest ~5 x 10⁷stars over the entire sky using UKST-UKidna and a northern-hemisphere counterpart. RAVE is an international
project involving participants from 10 nations. The PI is Matthias Steinmetz of Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam.

Survey Initialisation

Bright-of-Moon observations for RAVE began at the UKST on 11 April 2003 using the newly-commissioned 1700I VPH grating covering the wavelength range 8415–8800 Å. The initial input catalogue consists of a combination of Tycho-2 (I<11) and SuperCosmos (UKST IVN; I>11) data with |b|>30 deg, provided by Brad Gibson (Swinburne). A total of 358 mainly non-overlapping fields have been selected, each of which has two independent sets of ~200 targets so that two separate 6dF pointings can be made. (The input catalogue is currently being augmented to include galactic plane fields.)

Observations for each RAVE field currently consist of a 250-sec fibre flat field, a sequence of Rb, HgCd and Ne arcs (of 10, 50 and 200 secs respectively) and 5 x 600 secs on the field. Field turn-round is thus robot-limited, with a maximum of 8 fields per completely clear night possible during the winter months. (So far, 7 have been routinely achieved on nights with some cloud interference.)

At present, RAVE observations occupy 7 Bright-of-Moon nights per lunation, the nights being added to the beginning and end of each 18-night scheduled lunation. Thus there remain 4 or 5 bright nights (including the night of Full Moon) that are not used by the telescope.

Latest survey progress chart

On the progress chart, singly-observed fields are coded yellow (light shading), while the 8 doubly-observed fields are coded green (dark shading).

An international press-release to announce the start of the survey was issued on 2 June, and since then, ABC TV’s “Catalyst” team has visited to film a segment on the survey (scheduled for broadcast on August 28). The third international workshop on the RAVE survey was held in Melbourne on Sat 12 July, immediately before the start of the IAU General Assembly.

Page maintained by: Fred Watson, AAO

e-mail: fgw@aaocbn.aao.gov.au

Last revision: 7 Nov 2003