H alpha survey of the small magellanic cloud

Abstract

We present the first results of a kinematical Hα survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud. We discuss the specialized instrumentation used in this survey (telescope, focal reducer, scanning Fabry-Perot interferometers and photon counting system). We discuss also the main aspects of the data reduction. We compare the quality of our data with those obtained by other authors. We present images of the SMC showing both the intensity and the radial velocity of the HII regions and a catalogue of velocities and Hα fluxes of 143 HII regions in this galaxy. We find that the HII region distribution follows that of the HI and we verify the existence of a gradient in velocities along the bar.