|
Since 2005, at the Mt. Bigelow Observatory, a group of astronomers from the University of Arizona have been working on the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS), a research program designed to find Near-Earth Objects: asteroids that may pose a threat to Earth. The main instrument used for the survey is a 70 cm Schmidt telescope (photo), that every night takes hundreds of images, allowing the construction of a huge database of the temporal variations of celestial objects.
This database is being used to produce the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS), a new data set produced by Caltech astronomers, that records the brightness variations of 200 million stars and other objects, that since 2005 have shown a brightness variation of at least one magnitude.
As pointed out by Andrew Drake (Caltech) at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society which has just ended in Austin, Texas, the total number of measurements contained in the CRTS currently exceeds 20 billion, and is currently updated on-line in real time. This is the largest database of its kind ever made available to the scientific community and will provide precious data for various fields of study, from supernovae to cataclysmic variables, novae, asteroids, Cepheids and quasars.
The CRTS is probably one of the best examples of the sharing of astronomical data, allowing anyone to access the constantly updated database for their own research needs, and to make their own discoveries.
|
|
|
by Michele Ferrara & Marcel
Clemens |
credit: Catalina Sky Survey |
|
