Astron. Astrophys. 360, 671-682 (2000)

2. Observations

2.1. BeppoSAX

RCW86 was observed by the BeppoSAX satellite (Boella et al. 1997a) twice: on February 28th, 1997, the SW part of the shell ("the knee") was pointed at RA= and DEC= (J2000); the NW rim was observed on January 12th, 1998, at RA= and DEC= (J2000). The two observations were processed with the SAXDAS software version 1.6.1 applying the standard corrections and event selections. Table 1 shows the properties of the resulting event lists. While RCW86 has a strong signal both in the LECS (Parmar et al. 1997) and MECS (Boella et al. 1997b) from 0.12 to 10.5 keV, we do not detect any signal in the HPGSPC (Manzo et al. 1997) and only a very weak signal in the PDS (Frontera et al. 1997) in the N pointing. All the 3 MECS detectors were available at the time of the SW observation, while the observation of the NW part was made after the MECS1 detector had failed.

Table 1. BeppoSAX observations of RCW86

2.2. ROSAT

There are 6 ROSAT (Trumper 1983) observation of RCW86. times. In the present work, we used the 4 public archive observations listed in Table 2, which have been obtained between 1992 September and 1995 August. Vink et al. (1997) used the same datasets to derive an hardness ratio map of this remnant, but no other reference to spectral analysis of these data have been found.

Table 2. Public ROSAT observations of RCW86.
Notes:
a) "h" indicates HRI observations; "p" indicates PSPC observations.

Fig. 1 shows the PSPC image of RCW86 with the regions used in the collection of source and background spectra. The background spectra have been corrected for the vignetting effect, using the average exposure time of pixels inside the background and source regions.

Fig. 1. ROSAT PSPC (0.1-2.4 keV) image of RCW86. The radius circles represent the extraction region of the source and background spectrum for the PSPC spectral analysis.

© European Southern Observatory (ESO) 2000

Online publication: August 17, 2000
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