Theoretical beam sensitivity pattern for the Parkes multibeam instrument at 1370 MHz.
Intensity is inversely proportional to rms noise.
The RA-DEC grid is appropriate for an observation on the northern meridian with the multibeam array at the nominal pa . The feeds are spaced on a hexagonal grid of side 262.5 mm which translates to an average beam separation on the sky of 28.6', or approximately 2.0 FWHP beamwidths. The simplest method is to fill in the largest gaps in the beam pattern, which requires a total of three interleaved observations for each field. The beams are unfortunately too far apart for this to be a useful mode of observing. This gives a average beam separation of 14.0', which is slightly less than the theoretical FWHP beamwidth of 14.4'.