A Pilot Study for the SCUBA-2 'All-Sky' Survey
  We have carried out a pilot study for the SCUBA-2 'All-Sky' Survey, SASSy, a
wide and shallow mapping project at 850 microns, designed to find rare objects,
both Galactic and extragalactic. Two distinct sets of exploratory observations
were undertaken, and used to test the SASSy approach and data reduction
pipeline. The first was a 0.5 by 0.5 degrees map around the nearby galaxy NGC
2559. The galaxy was easily detected at 156 mJy, but no other convincing
sources are present in the map. Comparison with other galaxies with similar
wavelength coverage indicates that NGC 2559 has relatively warm dust. The
second observations cover 1 square degree around the W5-E HII region. As well
as diffuse structure in the map, a filtering approach was able to extract 27
compact sources with signal-to-noise greater than 6. By matching with data at
other wavelengths we can see that the SCUBA-2 data can be used to discriminate
the colder cores. Together these observations show that the SASSy project will
be able to meet its original goals of detecting new bright sources which will
be ideal for follow-up observations with other facilities.
