Sky Surveys with the UK 1.2m Schmidt Telescope

Abstract

On 1983 September 3 we will be celebrating the tenth anniversary of the formal hand-over of the UK 1.2m Schmidt Telescope (UKST) by the manufacturers, Messrs. Grubb Parsons of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). The completion of commissioning was marked in 1973 by the taking of the first completely successful sky-limited photograph on hypersensitised Eastman-Kodak Illa-J emulsion, plate J149 of field 416. That plate itself led very quickly to exciting new scientific results, including the discovery of extraordinary and still apparently unique jets in the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1097 by Wolstencroft & Zealey (1975), a discussion of the clustering of 3000 faint galaxies (Dodd et al., 1975; 1976) and a suggestion that faint blue stellar objects are not randomly distributed (Hawkins & Reddish, 1975).