The survey

The MIGHTEE survey is being carried at L-band (900 MHz - 1.6 GHz) with the MeerKAT radio telescope. The survey simultaneously provides continuum, spectral line and polarisation information, and reaches a continuum sensitivity of ~1 uJy/beam.

Full details can be found in the MIGHTEE survey description paper (Jarvis et al., 2016), the continuum early science data release paper (Heywood et al., 2022) and the HI survey description paper (Maddox et al., 2021).

Information about how to access the data can be found here. A list of the L-band pointing centres can be found here and the the pointings over all fields can be seen in the image below.

The MIGHTEE L-band Survey pointings in XMM-LSS, E-CDFS, ELAIS-S1 and COSMOS fields.

The original MIGHTEE proposal also requested a observations over a smaller area with the S-band receiver on MeerKAT. This was to enable a range of new science in both continuum and polarisation, aided particularly by the higher resolution of S-band. We have begun to acquire these S-band data across the COSMOS, XMMLSS and ECDFS fields. The pointings for the initial S-band observations in the XMMLSS fields can be seen in the image to the left (purple circles) superimposed on the L-band mosaic (Hale et al. in prep.) and initial observations in COSMOS and ECDFS can be seen below

Preliminary reduction of the S-band observations in the ECDFS field 

Preliminary reduction of the S-band observations in the COSMOS field 

The MeerKAT telescope. Credit: South African Radio Astronomy Observatory.

MeerKAT Telescope

The South African MeerKAT radio telescope is an array of 64 dishes located in the Karoo desert in the Northern Cape of South Africa. Inaugurated in 2018, MeerKAT is a pre-cursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope.

MeerKAT is operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, more details about the telescope can be found here.