Parkes observations for project P1067 semester 2020OCTS_01

Brief description

The Parkes Ultra-wide-bandwidth receiver (UWL) has enabled, for the first time with the Parkes telescope, a commensal high time and high frequency resolution survey. As part of the 2020APRS semester, we have been able to demonstrate the viability of this technique through observations of the region of the Galaxy known as "Baade's Window", in which we are guaranteed detections of pulsars and spectral lines. Our science drivers are diverse and range from understanding scattering, to detecting new pulsars, to searching for galaxies in the zone of avoidance, probing the globular cluster at the centre of the window and studying OH circumstellar masers and CO-dark molecular gas. For the 2020OCTS semester, we propose to repeat the initial survey after an interval of 6 months. This is intended to allow for the confirmation of any newly discovered pulsars and spectral detections, and to provide a means of discriminating new spectral features from background interference by measuring their Doppler shift over the Earth's orbit. The observing strategy and processing software developed for this survey will be applicable to all future Parkes surveys with the UWL or the future cyrogenically-cooled phased array feed (CryoPAF).