The "Australia Telescope ESO Slice Project" (ATESP)

More than ten years ago the ATESP project was started by a group of astronomers from the Radio astronomy institute in Bologna (Isabella Prandoni [PI], Paola Parma, Loretta Gregorini, Paolo Vettolani and me) and the Australian ATNF (Mark Wieringa and Ron Ekers). The original idea was to construct a sample of galaxies selected from an ESO key project, and observe these with the Australia Telescope at 1.4 GHz. However, very soon ATESP became one in a series of sub-mJy surveys that can be used to analyze the composition and cosmological evolution of populations of faint (sub-mJy) radio sources.

Now there is a series of papers (all published in Astronomy & Astrophysics) dealing with radio observations at 1.4, 4.8, 8.6 and 19 GHz, which are listed below. All articles are in pdf format:

• The Atesp radio survey I (1.4 GHz observations)
• The Atesp radio survey II (1.4 GHz source catalogue)
• The Atesp radio survey III (1.4 GHz source counts)
• The Atesp radio survey IV (optical identifications and spectroscopy)
• The Atesp 5 GHz radio survey I (5 GHz observations)
• The Atesp 5 GHz radio survey II (Physical properties)
• The Atesp 5 GHz radio survey III (follow-up observations at 4.8, 8.6 and 19 GHz)

Preliminary discussions on faint radio populations can be found in some Conference contributions:

• Perspectives for future deep surveys (2007 Conference, Manchester, UK)
• The nanoJansky radio sky (2007 Conference on SKA, ESO)