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Session 55 - New Digital Sky Surveys.
Display session, Wednesday, June 10
Atlas Ballroom,
As part of the Minnesota Automated Plate Scanner project, we are repeating the proper motion survey for which the machine was originally built. We have scanned the Palomar Schmidt red plates taken by Willem Luyten in the 1960's with glass copies of the POSS I red plates. Epoch difference varies from field to field but is typically in the range of 11-15 years. With the upgrade to the APS and improvements in computing since Luyten's original survey, we expect to measure the relative displacements of objects between the first and second epoch plates to the APS limiting accuracy, about 1 \mum (0\d"07). This corresponds to a relative proper motion precision of 0\d"006 year^-1 for a 12-year baseline. Objects classified as galaxies in the APS catalog of the POSS I will be measured along with the stars and used to set the absolute proper motion zero-point. The survey will cover the 664 fields with |b|>20^\circ, and we estimate the proper motion catalog to contain several tens of millions of stars brighter than E magnitude \sim20, making it the largest such catalog in existence. The APS-Luyten Proper Motion Database will join the APS Object and Image databases online as a single federated database and will be available to the astronomical community. The database will be useful for placing both kinematic and structural constraints on Galactic models, as well as the search for Pop II white dwarfs, lower main sequence stars, brown dwarfs, common motion pairs, moving groups, and other interesting objects. This paper describes our recent progress and future plans.
