  A new polarization survey of the northern sky at 1.41 GHz is presented. The
observations were carried out using the 25.6m telescope at the Dominion Radio
Astrophysical Observatory in Canada, with an angular resolution of 36 arcmin.
The data are corrected for ground radiation to obtain Stokes U and Q maps on a
well-established intensity scale tied to absolute determinations of zero
levels, containing emission structures of large angular extent, with an rms
noise of 12 mK. Survey observations were carried out by drift scanning the sky
between -29 degr and +90 degr declination. The fully sampled drift scans,
observed in steps of 0.25 degr to 2.5 degr in declination, result in a northern
sky coverage of 41.7% of full Nyquist sampling. The survey surpasses by a
factor of 200 the coverage, and by a factor of 5 the sensitivity, of the
Leiden/Dwingeloo polarization survey (Spoelstra 1972) that was until now the
most complete large-scale survey. The temperature scale is tied to the
Effelsberg scale. Absolute zero-temperature levels are taken from the
Leiden/Dwingeloo survey after rescaling those data by the factor of 0.94. The
paper describes the observations, data processing, and calibration steps. The
data are publicly available at http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/div/konti/26msurvey
or http://www.drao.nrc.ca/26msurvey.
