We have surveyed a large section of the galactic plane in the OH 1612-MHz
satellite line. The aim of the survey was to sample the stellar
dynamics in the plane, cutting through the major components of
the Galaxy. Very strong radiation is emitted in the observed OH line
by, amongst others, OH/IR stars (for a review see Habing 1996). These
are particularly suitable tracers of the stellar dynamics for a
variety of reasons. Most important is that they are easily observable in
any region of the Galaxy, their
line-of-sight velocity can be
determined very accurately and they represent a large fraction of
the stellar population. This article is the sequel to previous
articles discussing the Australia
Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) "Bulge'' (
,
Sevenster et al. 1997a, Paper I) and "Disk''
(
,
Sevenster et al. 1997b, Paper II) parts of the survey.
Here we discuss the results of the northern plane region, between
and
.
This region was observed with the VLA in New Mexico.
We discuss the observations in Sect. 2 and the data reduction in Sect. 3. In Sect. 4 we give the results of this survey and in Sect. 5 a statistical analysis of the data, that, like Paper II, follows closely the analysis in Paper I. We summarize in Sect. 6.
Copyright ESO 2001