Pan-STARRS Releases Largest Digital Sky Survey to the World
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Originally Posted by Institute for astronomy, University of Hawaii
The Pan-STARRS project at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy is publicly releasing the world's largest digital sky survey today, via the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland.
"The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys allow anyone to access millions of images and use the database and catalogs containing precision measurements of billions of stars and galaxies," said Dr. Ken Chambers, Director of the Pan-STARRS Observatories. "Pan-STARRS has made discoveries from Near Earth Objects and Kuiper Belt Objects in the Solar System to lonely planets between the stars; it has mapped the dust in three dimensions in our galaxy and found new streams of stars; and it has found new kinds of exploding stars and distant quasars in the early universe."
"With this release we anticipate that scientists - as well as students and even casual users - around the world will make many new discoveries about the universe from the wealth of data collected by Pan-STARRS," Chambers added.
The four years of data comprise 3 billion separate sources, including stars, galaxies, and various other objects. The immense collection contains 2 petabytes of data, which is equivalent to one billion selfies., or one hundred times the total content of Wikipedia.
The first Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) observatory is a 1.8-meter telescope at the summit of Haleakalā, on Maui. In May 2010, it embarked on a digital sky survey of the sky in visible and near infrared light. This was the first survey to observe the entire sky visible from Hawaii multiple times in many colors of light, with the goal of finding moving, transient, and variable objects, including asteroids that could potentially threaten the Earth. The survey took approximately four years to complete, and scanned the sky 12 times in each of five filters.
