We measure the neutral atomic hydrogen (HI) gas content of field galaxies at intermediate redshifts of z ~ 0.1 and z ~ 0.2 using hydrogen 21-cm emission lines observed with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT). In order to make high signal
-to-noise ratio detections, an HI signal stacking technique is applied: HI emission spectra from multiple galaxies, optically selected by the CNOC2 redshift survey project, are co-added to measure the average HI mass of galaxies in the two redshift bins. We calculate the cosmic HI gas densities ({Omega}_{HI}) at the two redshift regimes and compare those with measurements at other redshifts to investigate the global evolution of the HI gas density over cosmic time. From a total of 59 galaxies at z ~ 0.1 we find {Omega}_{HI} = (0.33 $pm$ 0.05) ~ $times$ 10$^{-3}$, and at z ~ 0.2 we find {Omega}_{HI} = (0.34 $pm$ 0.09) ~ $times$ 10$^{-3}$, based on 96 galaxies. These measurements help bridge the gap between high-z damped Lyman-$alpha$ observations and blind 21-cm surveys at $z=$ 0. We find that our measurements of {Omega}_{HI} at z ~ 0.1 and 0.2 are consistent with the HI gas density at z ~ 0 and that all measurements of {Omega}_{HI} from 21-cm emission observations at $z la$ ~ 0.2 are in agreement with no evolution of the HI gas content in galaxies during the last 2.4 Gyr.
This paper describes the on-telescope performance of the Wide Field Spectrograph (WiFeS). The design characteristics of this instrument, at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA) of the Australian National University (ANU) and mount
ed on the ANU 2.3m telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory has been already described in an earlier paper (Dopita et al. 2007). Here we describe the throughput, resolution and stability of the instrument, and describe some minor issues which have been encountered. We also give a description of the data reduction pipeline, and show some preliminary results.
