Columbia University Southern Hemisphere Millimeter-Wave Survey Telescope

Abstract

After seven years of use the Columbia millimeter-wave telescope has demonstrated the utility of an instrument in the one meter class dedicated to CO observations. It has almost finished a task that would be totaly impractical at the resolution of a 10 meter telescope, namely a complete northern hemisphere inventory of molecular matter both in the distant galactic plane and in the nearby clouds in the local arm and Gould’s belt. This has been possible because the 8 minute beamwidth of our telescope is well matched to such projects, allowing, for example, the first quadrant of the distant galactic plane to be surveyed in a few hundred days of observation.