A wide field view of the galactic center region

A long monitoring campaign is being carried out on the galactic bulge region with the Wide Field Camera's on BeppoSAX. The unique large field of view combined with arcminute resolution makes the instrument very suitable to detect fast X-ray phenomena at unpredictable times or positions on the sky, such as X-ray bursts, gamma ray bursts and flares. The diagnostic value of such phenomena can be very high. Type I X-ray bursts unambiguously identify the compact object in X-ray binaries as a neutron star. Long inactive periods may hide this evidence for a number of sources. Unpredictable bursts from such system are relatively easy detected with WFC. Therefore, the current exposures with the WFCs lead to a significant increase in the total number of neutron-star low mass X-ray binaries. They include (1) new transients, (2) sources previously thought to contain black holes, (3) sources previously thought to be a high mass X-ray binary, (4) sources in globular clusters.