219 million stars: a detailed catalogue of the visible Milky Way
From the post:
A new catalogue of the visible part of the northern part of our home Galaxy, the Milky Way, includes no fewer than 219 million stars. Geert Barentsen of the University of Hertfordshire led a team who assembled the catalogue in a ten year programme using the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Their work appears today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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The production of the catalogue, IPHAS DR2 (the second data release from the survey programme The INT Photometric H-alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane, IPHAS), is an example of modern astronomy’s exploitation of ‘big data’. It contains information on 219 million detected objects, each of which is summarised in 99 different attributes.
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The new work appears in Barentsen et al, “The second data release of the INT Photometric Hα Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS DR2)“, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 444, pp. 3230-3257, 2014, published by Oxford University Press. A preprint version is available on the arXiv server.
The catalogue is accessible in queryable form via the VizieR service at the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg. The processed IPHAS images it is derived from are also publically available.
At 219 million detected objects, each with 99 different attributes, that sounds like “big data” to me. 😉
Enjoy!