Vista Stares Deep Into the Cosmos: Treasure Trove of New Infrared Data Made Available to Astronomers
From the post:
The European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope has created the widest deep view of the sky ever made using infrared light. This new picture of an unremarkable patch of sky comes from the UltraVISTA survey and reveals more than 200 000 galaxies. It forms just one part of a huge collection of fully processed images from all the VISTA surveys that is now being made available by ESO to astronomers worldwide. UltraVISTA is a treasure trove that is being used to study distant galaxies in the early Universe as well as for many other science projects.
ESO’s VISTA telescope has been trained on the same patch of sky repeatedly to slowly accumulate the very dim light of the most distant galaxies. In total more than six thousand separate exposures with a total effective exposure time of 55 hours, taken through five different coloured filters, have been combined to create this picture. This image from the UltraVISTA survey is the deepest [1] infrared view of the sky of its size ever taken.
The VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile is the world’s largest survey telescope and the most powerful infrared survey telescope in existence. Since it started work in 2009 most of its observing time has been devoted to public surveys, some covering large parts of the southern skies and some more focused on small areas. The UltraVISTA survey has been devoted to the COSMOS field [2], an apparently almost empty patch of sky which has already been extensively studied using other telescopes, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope [3]. UltraVISTA is the deepest of the six VISTA surveys by far and reveals the faintest objects.
Another six (6) terabytes of images, just in case you are curious.
And the rate of acquisition of astronomical data is only increasing.
Clever insights into how to more efficiently process and analyze the resulting data are surely welcome.