The Most Detailed Sky Survey in the World Now Available on SKY-MAP.ORG
From WikiSky
SKY-MAP.ORG has recently opened the access to the images of the DSS2 - one of the most detailed and comprehensive digital sky survey in the world. Thus SKY-MAP.ORG has strengthened its position as the absolute world leader in the field of visualization of astrophysical data.
DSS2 consists of thousands of high-quality photographs of outer space made by powerful telescopes located in the mountainous regions of America and Australia. Using an original technology, SKY-MAP.ORG has “tiled” these space photographs to cover the entire sky sphere, combine and match the pictures accurately with their real sky counterparts. The volume of DSS2 is huge. It would require a display of approximately 625000 sq. m. to view the entire survey at the same time in its full resolution.
SKY-MAP.ORG is the only system in the world in which all images are completely aligned with the data of astronomical catalogs. These data are automatically updated in the picture viewing process, and the system allows a user to obtain information about displayed space objects by simply pointing a computer mouse at them.
The integration of the DSS2 data into SKY-MAP.ORG is a breakthrough in the field of the visualization of astronomical data. The combination of the unique features of SKY-MAP.ORG with the unique data from the DSS2 system has given users opportunities that they could have only dreamed of. The SKY-MAP.ORG search system allows the user to find a high-resolution image of practically any astronomical object instantly.
DSS2 - is a wide array of data and enormous in terms of its volume and complexity. The base for DSS2 is a collection of 6000 super-high quality photographic plates (~ 6.5 x 6.5 degrees) made by The Palomar Observatory (San Diego County, California) and The UK Schmidt Telescope (Siding Spring Mountain in north-western New South Wales, Australia). In its digital format, the DSS2’s volume exceeds 7 TB, therefore approximately 10000 CD or 1600 DVD would have been required to store the survey. The SKY-MAP team has combined the entire data into a single all-sky survey, which consists of 50000 color 16 MPixels images. Therefore the subtotal for the entire survey is more than 800 GPixels. The software development and the parameters’ selection for the images have taken several months, and the total time of image processing on a powerful quad-core workstation has exceeded 900 hours.
