Acknowledgements

This major undertaking has received the generous technical and scientific support of many individuals. The NRAO staff has provided extremely valuable assistance in many aspects of the observations themselves and in the area of software support; in particular, we are grateful to Rick Perley, Ken Sowinski, Barry Clark, and Bill Cotton in this regard. The support of the erstwhile NRAO Director, Paul van den Bout, and the yeoman service provided by Frazer Owen as Chair of the Survey Oversight Committee are also greatly appreciated. We also thank the members of the Oversight Committee (Ken Chambers, Eric Feigelson, Jackie Hewitt, Gillian Knapp, and Rogier Windhorst) for their time and wise counsel in this enterprise.

Acknowledgement is also due our colleagues who are involved in the ongoing FIRST effort, including Richard McMahon and Isobel Hook. This work is supported in part under the auspices of the Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract No. W-7405-ENG-48 and the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, whose former director Charles Alcock was particularly supportive. We also acknowledge a generous planning grant from the CalSpace Institute; support from the STScI archive group, former STScI director Bob Williams, and the STScI Director's Discretionary Research Fund; computing resources from Columbia University; grants from the National Science Foundation; a gift of computing equipment from Sun Microsystems; a NATO travel grant to support our collaboration with Richard McMahon; and an award from the National Geographic Society which, in the spirit of their support 40 years ago for the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, has provided funds to continue our charting of the Universe.