Hamburger Sternwarte - Research
Objective Prism Surveys
The Hamburg sky surveys made on Schmidt plates taken with objective prisms
consist of two complementary parts: The northern Hamburg Quasar Survey (HQS)
(b) and the southern Hamburg/ESO Survey (HES) (b). The plates of the HQS were taken 1985 - 1997 with the
Calar Alto Schmidt telescope, and contain usable spectra with a seeing limited
resolution of H in the magnitude range 14 B 19. The southern
plates were obtained with the ESO Schmidt telescope 1990 - 1996, having a
spectral resolution of Å at H and containing usable spectra in the magnitude range
13 B
18.
The HQS archive contains 1288 plates for
567 fields, while for the HES one spectral
plate was taken for each of 428 fields. Plates for both surveys are scanned
in full mapping mode by the Hamburg PDS microdensitometer and the digitized
database is used for a variety of
astronomical applications, in addition to the search for (mostly bright)
quasars.
X-ray astronomy became topic of research in Hamburg with the launch of the
ROSAT satellite in 1990. A larger effort undertaken is the identification of
ROSAT sources on Schmidt plates of the Hamburg Quasar Survey. Based on these
identifications several AGN related projects were pursued,
involving follow-up observations of selected X-ray sources with ROSAT and optical
telescopes.
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