A deep radio survey of the AKARI North Ecliptic Pole Field - WSRT 20 cm
  Radio survey description, observations and data reduction
  The Westerbork Radio Synthesis Telescope, WSRT, has been used to make a deep
radio survey of an ~ 1.7 sq degree field coinciding with the AKARI North
Ecliptic Pole Deep Field. The observations, data reduction and source count
analysis are presented, along with a description of the overall scientific
objectives. The survey consisted of 10 pointings, mosaiced with enough overlap
to maintain a similar sensitivity across the central region that reached as low
as 21 microJy per beam at 1.4 GHz. A catalogue containing 462 sources detected
with a resolution of 17"x15" is presented. The differential source counts
calculated from the WSRT data have been compared with those from the shallow
VLA-NEP survey of Kollgaard et al 1994, and show a pronounced excess for
sources fainter than ~ 1 mJy, consistent with the presence of a population of
star forming galaxies at sub-mJy flux levels. The AKARI North Ecliptic Pole
Deep field is the focus of a major observing campaign conducted across the
entire spectral region. The combination of these data sets, along with the deep
nature of the radio observations will allow unique studies of a large range of
topics including the redshift evolution of the luminosity function of radio
sources, the clustering environment of radio galaxies, the nature of obscured
radio-loud active galactic nuclei, and the radio/far-infrared correlation for
distant galaxies. This catalogue provides the basic data set for a future
series of paper dealing with source identifications, morphologies, and the
associated properties of the identified radio sources.
