MOJAVE: Monitoring of Jets in Active Galactic Nuclei with VLBA Experiments. III. Deep VLA Images at 1.4 GHz

The MOJAVE blazar sample consists of the 133 brightest, most compact radio-loud AGNs in the northern sky, and it is selected on the basis of VLBA 2 cm correlated flux density exceeding 1.5 Jy (2 Jy for declinations south of 0°) at any epoch between 1994 and 2003. Since 1994 we have been gathering VLBA data on the sample to measure superluminal jet speeds and to better understand the parsec-scale kinematics of AGN jets. We have obtained 1.4 GHz VLA A configuration data on 57 of these sources to investigate whether the extended luminosity of blazars is correlated with parsec-scale jet speed and also to determine what other parsec-scale properties are related to extended morphology, such as optical emission line strength and gamma-ray emission. We present images and measurements of the kiloparsec scale emission from the VLA data, which will be used in subsequent statistical studies of the MOJAVE sample.