A&A Supplement Series, Vol. 125, October I 1997, 99-138
Received October 21, 1996; accepted January 2, 1997
M. Bitran
, H. Alvarez, L. Bronfman, J.
May, - P. Thaddeus
Send offprint request: J. May
Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Chile,
Casilla 36-D, Santiago, Chile
Harvard-Smithonian
Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
We present the data from a CO(
) survey of the
central
region of our Galaxy. The observations were obtained with the 1.2-m
Southern Millimeter-wave Telescope at Cerro Tololo Interamerican
Observatory, Chile.
This instrument has a full beam-width at half maximum (FWHM) of
at 115 GHz, the frequency of the observed transition.
The survey covers a strip 4
wide in latitude along the galactic
equator in the range 
. The spatial sampling
interval was 
(0.85 beam-widths) for 
, and
(1.7
beam-widths) for 
.
The velocity coverage allowed by the filterbank was of 333 km s-1 with
a resolution of 1.3 km s-1 at 115 GHz. For the central few
degrees (
) where this velocity span was not wide
enough, two spectra, taken with different velocities
with respect to the local standard of rest (VLSR), were combined in order
to cover the full range of the galactic center CO emission.
The antenna temperature noise level of the spectra was 
K (rms).
The data are presented in a latitude-longitude spatial map and in
sets of longitude-velocity and latitude-velocity diagrams.
This survey
combines the characteristics of
being very sensitive and well sampled,
and of having one of the
widest and more homogeneous spatial coverage of the region within
kpc from the galactic center.
keywords: surveys -- ISM: molecules -- Galaxy: center -- radio lines: ISM