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Session 55 - New Digital Sky Surveys.
Display session, Wednesday, June 10
Atlas Ballroom,
The Catalogs and Surveys Branch of the Space Telescope Science Institute, in collaboration with the Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino, the GEMINI project and ESA, is constructing a second generation Guide Star Catalogue (GSC-II) of astronomical objects to support the operations of current and future ground and space based telescopes.
The second generation sky survey plates (POSS-II and SES) are being digitized at STScI, which when combined with the first epoch plates will allow us to produce a catalogue containing positions, proper motions, magnitudes and colurs to at least 18th magnitude for operational purposes.
In addition to constructing such a catalogue, STScI is also compressing the second generation plate images using the same technique used for the DSS-I and is making the scan data available to the community in advance of a more general data distribution on CD/DVD.
In this presentation we report on the status of the plate digitization, compression and plate processing. A separate contribution will describe the unique database aspects of this project.
