A look at the Madau plot shows that the scatter in the star formation rate (SFR) density at redshift 4 is large. Upcoming facilities are expected will resolves this scatter. At lower redshift end of the peak of the SFR, we would expect a better situation, alas it is not. At redshift ~ 1 the scatter is as bad if not worse. GALEX and HST have been used in the past to get better constraints in this redshift regime. With its large FOV, GALEX provides a
good sky coverage, but because of its coarse PSF, source confusion becomes a big problem. HST on the other hand has amazing resolution, but the small area covered brings cosmic variance into picture.
The XMM-Newton Optical/UV Monitor telescope (XMM-OM) provides UV imaging with a nice compromise between the FOV and PSF. Now into its early twenties, XMM-Newton has a wealth of archival data waiting to be explored. In this work we use data collected over a time period of 10 years by XMM-OM. In particular we use the UVW1 (291 nm) imaging that covers 395 sq. arcmins of the CDFS down to UVW1 mag 24.5 and 1.56 sq. degrees of COSMOS field to a depth of 23.0 UVW1 magnitudes. Our calculations of the Galaxy luminosity function (LF) at rest frame 150 nm, show that the characteristic magnitude M* evolves significantly during this epoch, in contrast with the previous studies.
Using the UV LF we estimate the SFR density in the redshift range 0.6 to 1.2.