The latest professional H-alpha survey of the southern Milky Way is called
VPHAS+
It utilizes the 2.6 meter VLT Survey Telescope (the VST) together with the OmegaCAM array of CCDs (
http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/pa...omegacam/inst/ ) , and it will survey much of the southern Milky Way:
http://www.vphasplus.org/
[[VPHAS+ is the successor to the deep H-alpha survey of the Milky Way that was done (still on film!) with the UK Schmidt Telescope:
http://www-wfau.roe.ac.uk/sss/halpha/
]]
Some of the first H-alpha images from the newest survey are
probably available through the ESO data archive. They are made through the NB 659 filter, which is similar to an H-alpha filter :
http://archive.eso.org/wdb/wdb/adp/phase3_main/form
Madbadgalaxyman's opinionated commentary :
Despite the use of a gigantic telescope, and perhaps because of the prohibitively large time and money expenditure that would be necessary to undertake the best possible survey of the Milky Way with a 2.6 meter telescope, VPHAS+ is
far from being the ultimate H-alpha survey of the band of the Milky Way.....
(1)
Firstly, these Large Telescope H-alpha images are not going to be particularly deep images, though the angular resolution of the images is very good; 1 arcsecond or even better.
A
pparently only 120 second exposures !!!....
In my view, this means that the survey won't be able to detect ultra-faint nebular structures; It seems to me that, even made with a 100 inch telescope, such short exposures might not detect faint expanding supershells and faint Supernova Remnants.
Why on Earth use a giant telescope and then make shallow exposures??? (actually, the same criticism could be made about many Hubble Telescope exposures)
So I predict that the deepest H-alpha survey of the Milky Way is going to be done by an amateur astronomer.
(2)
Another deficiency of the VPHAS+ is that the survey fields do not stretch very far above the galactic equator (the apparent plane of our galaxy), so highly unusual and interesting structures high above the galactic plane, such as those detected in Greg Bradley's very deep Milky Way exposures, will not be imaged in this survey.
Many of the
least known and
most interesting gaseous structures in spiral galaxies are well above the principal plane of a galaxy, e.g. gas being ejected from a galaxy and gas falling into a galaxy from its halo. Yet it is precisely these least understood H-alpha structures that won't be surveyed!
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