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posted by CoolHand on Sunday December 25 2016, @01:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the my-god-it's-full-of-stars dept.

The University of Hawaii Institute of Astronomy has released a catalog of 3 billion astronomical objects imaged by the Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System:

The Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS, began observing the night sky in 2010, using a 1.8-meter telescope at the summit of Haleakala, on the island of Maui in Hawaii. In four years, the telescope scanned about three-quarters of the visible sky 12 times (using five different light filters), gradually registering about 3 billion unique objects, according to the project collaborators.

The newly released catalog is the world's largest digital sky survey to date, according to a statement from the University of Hawaii Institute of Astronomy, the project's headquarters. The catalog consists of 2 billion petabytes of data (2 million gigabytes), which is about 100 times the total content of Wikipedia. In addition to making the data freely available, the project collaborators have spent years making the catalog easy for other scientists to use.

One of the key objectives of Pan-STARRS (and of many other survey projects) is to look for short-term changes in the night sky. By comparing the images of the same section of the sky taken on different dates (or over multiple dates), scientists can look for small changes, such as objects moving or changing in brightness. With this method, Pan-STARRS has already helped identify a new comet and multiple near-Earth asteroids. (Pan-STARRS set a record by finding 19 new asteroids in a single night).

[more...]

Also at the Max Planck Institute:

The roll-out of the data is being done in two steps. Today's release is the "Static Sky," which is the average of each of the individual epochs. For every object, there's an average value for its position, its brightness, and its colours. Furthermore, for each object it will be possible to get the stack image in each of the observed colours. For galaxies there is further information such as their brightness for various aperture sizes and the seeing conditions. In 2017, the second set of data will be released, providing this information for each individual epoch, and also allowing people to access the individual images for each observation run. The full database will include information on each of the individual snapshots that Pan-STARRS took of a given region of sky, and that will complete the full 2 petabytes of data.

The Pan-STARRS1 data archive home page


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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday December 25 2016, @02:19AM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 25 2016, @02:19AM (#445707) Homepage Journal

    Now which is it? 2 billion petabytes or 2 million gigabytes. They're not even close.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @02:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @02:46AM (#445713)

    Now which is it? 2 billion petabytes or 2 million gigabytes. They're not even close.

    That's probably a typo. I'm betting they meant Now which is it? 2 million petabytes or 2 billion gigabytes.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Kymation on Sunday December 25 2016, @05:10AM

    by Kymation (1047) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 25 2016, @05:10AM (#445734)

    TFA says it is 2 petabytes, not 2 billion petabytes.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @05:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @05:34AM (#445739)

    It might be easier to convert to mosquito bites in Florida ;-)