44 million stars and counting: Astronomers play Snap and remap the sky
From the post:
Tens of millions of stars and galaxies, among them hundreds of thousands that are unexpectedly fading or brightening, have been catalogued properly for the first time.
Professor Bryan Gaensler, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) based in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, Australia, and Dr Greg Madsen at the University of Cambridge, undertook this formidable challenge by combining photographic and digital data from two major astronomical surveys of the sky, separated by sixty years.
The new precision catalogue has just been published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. It represents one of the most comprehensive and accurate compilations of stars and galaxies ever produced, covering 35 percent of the sky and using data going back as far as 1949.
Professor Gaensler and Dr Madsen began by re-examining a collection of 7400 old photographic plates, which had previously been combined by the US Naval Observatory into a catalogue of more than one billion stars and galaxies.
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The researchers are making their entire catalogue public on the WWW, in the lead-up to the next generation of telescopes designed to search for changes in the night sky, such as the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System in Hawaii and the SkyMapper telescope in Australia. (unlike the Astrophysical Journal article referenced above)
Now there’s a big data project!
Because of the time period for comparison, the investigators found variations in star brightness that would have otherwise gone undetected.
Will your data be usable in sixty (60) years?