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6 Summary

The ATESP survey at 1.4 GHz is based on snapshot observations of 320 overlapping primary beam fields, reduced separately and then combined together to produce 16 big mosaiced images. The total area surveyed with uniform sensitivity ($1 \sigma$ noise level $\sim 79 \mu$ Jy) covers 25.9 sq. degr. The spatial resolution is typically $\sim 8\hbox{$^{\prime\prime}$ }\times 14\hbox{$^{\prime\prime}$ }$ providing radio positions with internal accuracy of the order of 1 arcsec for $6\sigma$ radio sources.

We stress the importance of estimating the relevance and the behaviour of the so called clean bias effect for any deep survey obtained with snapshot observations. The source fluxes can be seriously affected by such problem and for reliable scientific analysis the effect must be taken into account and corrected for.

Future papers in this series will deal with:

1.
The radio sources catalogue complete down to a limiting $6\sigma$ flux density of $\sim 0.5$ mJy;
2.
The ATESP radio source counts;
3.
The radio properties of the ESP galaxies and the local bivariate luminosity function;
4.
The optical identifications and spectroscopy of the objects in the EIS sub-region.

Acknowledgements
IP would like to thank the ATNF and the ATCA for hospitality in Epping and Narrabri for long periods during 1994, 1995 and 1996. A special thank also to the ATNF staff, in particular to Neil Killeen and Bob Sault, for their valuable help in the development of the data reduction pipeline. The authors acknowledge Roberto Fanti for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this manuscript. This project was undertaken under the CSIRO/CNR Collaboration programme. The Australia Telescope is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO.


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