The AAO/UKST SuperCOSMOS Ha survey

The UK Schmidt Telescope (UKST) of the Anglo-Australian Observatory completed a narrow-band H plus [NII] 6548, 6584°A survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Magellanic Clouds in late 2003. The survey, which was the last UKST wide-field pho- tographic survey, and the only one undertaken in a narrow band, is now an on-line digital data product of the Wide-Field Astronomy Unit of the Royal Observatory Ed- inburgh (ROE). The survey utilised a high specification, monolithic H interference band-pass filter of exceptional quality. In conjunction with the fine grained Tech-Pan film as a detector it has produced a survey with a powerful combination of area cover- age (4000 square degrees), resolution (∼1 arcsecond) and sensitivity (≤5 Rayleighs), reaching a depth for continuum point sources of R ≃ 20.5. The main survey consists of 233 individual fields on a grid of centres separated by 4◦ at declinations below +2◦ and covers a swathe approximately 20◦ wide about the Southern Galactic Plane. The original survey films were scanned by the SuperCOSMOS measuring machine at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh to provide the on-line digital atlas called the SuperCOSMOS H Survey (SHS).