A global view on star formation: The GLOSTAR Galactic plane survey. I. Overview and first results for the Galactic longitude range 28° < l < 36°

Aims. Surveys of the Milky Way at various wavelengths have changed our view of star formation in our Galaxy considerably in recentyears. In this paper, we give an overview of a new survey covering large parts (145 square degrees) of the Northern Galactic planeusing the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) in the frequency range from 4 − 8 GHz and the Effelsberg 100-m telescope. Thisprovides for the first time a radio survey covering all angular scales down to 1.5 arcsec, similar to complementary NIR/MIR galacticplane surveys. We outline the main goals of the survey and give a detailed description about the observations and the data reductionstrategy.Methods. In our observations we cover the radio continuum in full polarization, as well as the 6.7 GHz methanol maser line, the4.8 GHz formaldehyde line, and 7 radio recombination lines. The observations were conducted in the most compact D-configuration ofthe VLA, as well as in the more extended B-configuration. This yielded spatial resolutions of 18” and 1.5” for the two configurations,respectively. Additionally, we also combined the D-configuration images with the Effelsberg 100-m data to provide zero spacinginformation, and we jointly imaged the D- and B-configuration data for optimal sensitivity of the intermediate spatial ranges.Results. Here, we show selected results for the first part of the survey, covering the range of 28◦ < l < 36◦and |b| < 1◦, including thefull low-resolution continuum image, examples of high-resolution images of selected sources, and first results from the spectral line data.