XMM-Newton All Sky Slew Image

ESA's cornerstone mission XMM-Newton, with the huge collecting area of its mirrors and the high quantum efficiency and low background of its EPIC detectors, is the most sensitive X-ray observatory ever flown. This is impressively evident during EPIC-pn slew exposures which yield on average only seven seconds of on-source exposure time.

The data collected by XMM-Newton during this 'downtime', as it slews between dedicated pointings (slew speed ~90 degrees/hour), now cover half of the whole sky, and the very latest near-'all-sky' X-ray view of the cosmos is shown here in Galactic projection. Many sources and familiar features, including the largest extended structures and the brightest X-ray sources in the sky, are visible, as is the history, coverage and depth of the survey. In addition to the Cygnus Loop, and the bright Vela SNR and Sco-X1, visible also are the LMC, the SMC, the Virgo Cluster, Loop I and other large-scale structures. This exposure-corrected 0.2-2 keV image is made up of 836 slews, spanning nearly nine years of the mission, and is a mosaic of 53,495 1-degree images (plus equivalent exposure maps).

Credit: A. Read (University of Leicester) & ESA