Related papers: The Palomar-Quest Digital Synoptic Sky Survey

An automated, rapid classification of transient events detected in the modern synoptic sky surveys is essential for their scientific utility and effective follow-up using scarce resources. This presents some unusual challenges: the data are…

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a wide-field experiment designed to investigate the optical transient and variable sky on time scales from minutes to years. PTF uses the CFH12k mosaic camera, with a field of view of 7.9 deg^2 and a…

Sky surveys represent a fundamental data basis for astronomy. We use them to map in a systematic way the universe and its constituents, and to discover new types of objects or phenomena. We review the subject, with an emphasis on the…

Over the past decade, sky surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have proven the power of large data sets for answering fundamental astrophysical questions. This observational progress, based on a synergy of advances in telescope…

I first review the status of Digital Sky Surveys. The focus will be on extragalactic surveys with an area of more than 100 sq.deg. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is the archetype of such imaging surveys and it is its great success that has…

There is an increasing number of large, digital, synoptic sky surveys, in which repeated observations are obtained over large areas of the sky in multiple epochs. Likewise, there is a growth in the number of (often automated or robotic)…

The SkyMapper 1.3 m telescope at Siding Spring Observatory has now begun regular operations. Alongside the Southern Sky Survey, a comprehensive digital survey of the entire southern sky, SkyMapper will carry out a search for supernovae and…

The time domain has been identified as one of the most important areas of astronomical research for the next decade. The Virtual Observatory is in the vanguard with dedicated tools and services that enable and facilitate the discovery,…

In recent years the possibility of measuring the temporal change of radial and transverse position of sources in the sky in real time have become conceivable thanks to the thoroughly improved technique applied to new astrometric and…

We describe DPOSS, a new digital survey of the northern sky, based on the POSS-II photographic sky atlas. The survey covers the entire sky north of delta = -3 deg in 3 bands, calibrated to the Gunn $gri$ system, reaching to equivalent…

Cosmological data in the next decade will be characterized by high-precision, multi-wavelength measurements of thousands of square degrees of the same patches of sky. By performing multi-survey analyses that harness the correlated nature of…

A prototype system for the Permanent All Sky Survey (PASS) project is presented. PASS is a continuous photometric survey of the entire celestial sphere with a high temporal resolution. Its major objectives are the detection of all…

A program that we call the QUEST Data Processing Software Pipeline has been written to process the large volumes of data produced by the QUEST camera on the Samuel Oschin Schmidt Telescope at the Palomar Observatory. The program carries out…

We review some of the scientific opportunities and technical challenges posed by the exploration of the large digital sky surveys, in the context of a Virtual Observatory (VO). The VO paradigm will profoundly change the way observational…

Nowadays, as the quantity of data to process began to rise, so did the need for a method to discern what pieces of information could be useful for the user; in response, researchers focused their efforts on improving the already existing…

The changing heavens have played a central role in the scientific effort of astronomers for centuries. Galileo's synoptic observations of the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus starting in 1610, provided strong refutation of Ptolemaic…

Interferometric detectors will very soon give us an unprecedented view of the gravitational-wave sky, and in particular of the explosive and transient Universe. Now is the time to challenge our theoretical understanding of short-duration…

Policy Brief on "Latest Developments and Opportunities in Sky Survey", distilled from the corresponding panel that was part of the discussions during S20 Policy Webinar on Astroinformatics for Sustainable Development held on 6-7 July 2023.…

Cloud computing offers an opportunity to run compute-resource intensive climate models at scale by parallelising model runs such that datasets useful to the exoplanet community can be produced efficiently. To better understand the…

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a synoptic sky survey in operation since 2009. PTF utilizes a 7.1 square degree camera on the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt telescope to survey the sky primarily at a single wavelength (R-band) at a rate of…