Related papers: Palomar-QUEST: A case study in designing sky surve…
Exploration of the time variability on the sky over a broad range of flux levels and wavelengths is rapidly becoming a new frontier of astronomical research. We describe here briefly the Palomar-QUEST survey being carried out from the…
We have designed, constructed and put into operation a very large area CCD camera that covers the field of view of the 1.2 m Samuel Oschin Schmidt Telescope at the Palomar Observatory. The camera consists of 112 CCDs arranged in a mosaic of…
Like every other field of intellectual endeavor, astronomy is being revolutionised by the advances in information technology. There is an ongoing exponential growth in the volume, quality, and complexity of astronomical data sets, mainly…
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…
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…
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 describe briefly the Palomar-Quest (PQ) digital synoptic sky survey, including its parameters, data processing, status, and plans. Exploration of the time domain is now the central scientific and technological focus of the survey. To…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is an ambitious, multi-institutional project to create a huge digital imaging and spectroscopic data bank of 25% of the celestial sphere, approximately 10,000 deg^2 centred on the north galactic polar cap. The…
Large digital sky surveys, over a broad range of wavelengths, both from the ground and from space observatories, are becoming a major source of astronomical data. Some examples include the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Digital…
There has been an unprecedented and continuing growth in the volume, quality, and complexity of astronomical data sets over the past few years, mainly through large digital sky surveys. Virtual Observatory (VO) concept represents a…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a large-aperture, wide-field, ground-based survey system that will image the sky in six optical bands from 320 to 1050 nm, uniformly covering approximately $18,000$deg$^2$ of the sky over 800…
One of the new frontiers of astronomical research is the exploration of time variability on the sky at different wavelengths and flux levels. We have carried out a pilot project using DPOSS data to study strong variables and transients, and…
Astronomy has been at the forefront of the development of the techniques and methodologies of data intensive science for over a decade with large sky surveys and distributed efforts such as the Virtual Observatory. However, it faces a new…
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…
The analysis and an efficient scientific exploration of the Digital Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (DPOSS) represents a major technical challenge. The input data set consists of 3 Terabytes of pixel information, and contains a few billion…
The contemporary astronomical instruments have been producing the unprecedented amount of data. The largest part of this "data avalanche" is being produced by deep all-sky surveys yielding terabytes of raw data per night. Such a great data…
We identify 3,113 highly variable objects in 7,200 square degrees of the Palomar-QUEST Survey, which each varied by more than 0.4 magnitudes simultaneously in two broadband optical filters on timescales from hours to roughly 3.5 years. The…
In the era of big data astronomy, next generation telescopes and large sky surveys produce data sets at the TB or even PB level. Due to their large data volumes, these astronomical data sets are extremely difficult to transfer and analyze…
We present the VST Optical Imaging of the CDFS and ES1 Fields (VOICE) Survey, a VST INAF Guaranteed Time program designed to provide optical coverage of two 4 deg$^2$ cosmic windows in the Southern hemisphere. VOICE provides the first,…
The ensemble variability properties of nearly 23,000 quasars are studied using the Palomar-QUEST Survey. The survey has covered 15,000 square degrees multiple times over 3.5 years using 7 optical filters, and has been calibrated…