The Southern HII Region Discovery Survey (SHRDS): Pilot Survey
  The Southern HII Region Discovery Survey (SHRDS) is a survey of the third and
fourth quadrants of the Galactic plane that will detect radio recombination
line and continuum emission at cm-wavelengths from several hundred HII region
candidates using the Australia Telescope Compact Array. The targets for this
survey come from the WISE Catalog of Galactic HII Regions, and were identified
based on mid-infrared and radio continuum emission. In this pilot project, two
different configurations of the Compact Array Broad Band receiver and
spectrometer system were used for short test observations. The pilot surveys
detected radio recombination line emission from 36 of 53 HII region candidates,
as well as seven known \hii regions that were included for calibration. These
36 recombination line detections confirm that the candidates are true HII
regions, and allow us to estimate their distances.
