A SETI pilot survey with the Nançay Radio Telescope

The Kraus-type 100m-class Nançay Radio Telescope (NRT) [1,2], depicted here (credits : Max Planck Institute) and located 200 km south of Paris (France), will soon be the host of a pilot SETI program entitled 'A Search for Technosignatures from Nearby Stars and Galaxies' lead by the Breakthrough Listen group [3]. This recently allocated 35-hours program aims at surveying 52 nearby stars and galaxies selected from the Gaia DR2 catalog [4] (stars) and the Breakthrough Listen target sampling [5] (galaxies), and matching the telescope field-of-view. The sensitivity offered by the NRT enables the detection of continuous narrowband transmitters ranging from 3.4 to 50 TW Equivalent Isotropic Radiated Power (EIRP), depending on their distances from us. As a benchmark, the most powerful radio transmitter on Earth (Arecibo planetary RADAR [6]) emits up to 10 TW EIRP.
This is the first SETI program running at the Nançay observatory in more than 25 years!

References
[1] http://nrt.obspm.fr/
[2] http://nrt.obspm.fr/nrt/obs/NRT_tech_info.html
[3] http://seti.berkeley.edu/listen/
[4] https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dr2
[5] Isaacson, Howard, et al. "The breakthrough listen search for intelligent life: target selection of nearby stars and galaxies." Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 129.975 (2017): 054501.
[6] http://www.naic.edu/~nolan/radar/