The Marseille Observatory Hα Survey: Comparisons with CO, 6 CM and Iras Data

Abstract

The Marseille Observatory Ha survey supplies Ha velocities of the ionized hydrogen over large zones of the sky towards the galactic plane. This survey, led at the ESO La Silla, uses a 36 cm telescope equiped with a scanning Fabry-Perot interferometer and a photon counting camera (Le Coarer et al. 1992). About 250 fields (39′x39′) toward the galactic plane have already been covered (see Figure 1) with a spatial resolution of 9″x9″and a spectral resolution of 5 km s^-1. This allows us to observe the discrete HII regions and the diffuse ionized gas widely distributed between them and to separate the distinct layers found along the line of sight. HII regions are often grouped on the molecular cloud surface, then CO, radio continuum and recombination lines surveys of the galactic plane are also essential to distinguish the HII region-molecular cloud complexes met on the line of sight, and in order to take dynamical effects into account, such as the champagne effect, for the kinematic distance determination. Indeed, the spiral structure pattern determination requires avoiding any artificial spread by clearly identifying the giant complexes composed of molecular clouds, HII regions, diffuse ionized hydrogen widely surrounding them, and exciting stars. On the other hand the ionized gas data (Hα and recombination lines) associated with IRAS data help us to study the nature of the young objects constituent of these complexes and to assess their detectability.