Implementation of Tidbinbilla 70-m on-the-fly mapping and Hydrogen radio recombination line early results

On-the-fly mapping of cm-wave spectral lines has been implemented at the Tidbinbilla 70-m radio antenna.We describe the implementation and data reduction procedure and present new H92α radio recombination line maps towards Orion A and Sagittarius A. Comparison of the Orion A map to previous observations suggests that the lines arise largely from gas with electron density of 100-200 cm -3. On-the-fly mapping is very efficient at generating large maps of bright lines (such as radio recombination lines), but will still yield strong efficiency gains for smaller maps of fainter lines, such as the ammonia inversion lines at the 1.3 cm wavelength.