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 fiel d of view combined with arcminute resolution makes the instrument very suitable to detect East X-ray phenomena at unpredictable times or pos itions 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 num ber of sources. Unpredictable bursts from such system are relatively e asy 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 pre viously thought to contain black holes, (3) sources previously thought to be a high mass X-ray binary, (4) sources in globular clusters.