New large-scale CO surveys of the first and second Galactic quadrants and the nearby molecular cloud complexes in Orion and Taurus, obtained with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 1.2 m telescope, have been combined with 31 other surveys obtained over the past two decades with that instrument and a similar telescope on Cerro Tololo in Chile, to produce a new composite CO survey of the entire Milky Way. The survey consists of 488,000 spectra that Nyquist or beamwidth (1/8 deg) sample the entire Galactic plane over a strip 4 deg-10 deg wide in latitude, and beamwidth or 1/4 deg sample nearly all large local clouds at higher latitudes. Compared with the previous composite CO survey of Dame et al. (1987), the new survey has 16 times more spectra, up to 3.4 times higher angular resolution, and up to 10 times higher sensitivity per unit solid angle.

Users should be aware that both the angular resolution and the sensitivity varies from region to region in the velocity-integrated map. The component surveys were integrated individually using clipping or moment masking in order to display nearly all statistically significant emission but little noise above a level of ~1.5 K km/s. See the reference below and the

Millimeter-Wave Group site for more details Provenance: Data taken by two nearly-identical 1.2 m telescopes in Cambridge, MA and on Cerro Tololo, Chile combined into a complete survey of the Milky Way with CO integrated over all velocities.. This is a service of NASA HEASARC.