From WikiSky

Notes

SDSS and DSS2 surveys on WikiSky

WikiSky use SDSS survey (the images from Apache telescope (http://sdss.org) have been processed by Microsoft Research team (http://cas.sdss.org/dr6/en/) and that survey has been used by WikiSky (since 2006), GoogleSky (2007) and WWT (2008). The quality of the SDSS survey on all three resources is practically identical. SDSS survey covers about quarter of the sky.

The more challenging task was to process DSS2 all sky survey (http://www-gsss.stsci.edu/SkySurveys/SkySurveys.htm). Here all three teams have different versions processed out of same source data. To get beauty out of a bunch of black and white pictures is pretty challenging task. See WikiSky's press release: http://wikisky.org/wiki/Press_Releases WikiSky has released first version of DSS2 back in August'07 and about to release new much more improved version in couple of weeks. (now partly available on testing server at http://server3.sky-map.org:8084/index2.jsp?object=Antares&zoom=6&img_source=DSS2)