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B. P. Schmidt, S. C. Keller, P. J. Francis, M. S. Bessell (RSAA, ANU)
The SkyMapper Telescope is a new facility to replace the Great Melbourne Telescope, destroyed in the bushfires of 18 Jan 2003. This 1.3m telescope will have an 8 sq degree FOV at a scale of 30 microns per arcsecond, UV-transmissive optics, and be equipped with a 268 million pixel CCD mosaic camera. First light is scheduled for September 2006, with regular operations to commence in January 2007. The telescope will spend 75% of its time undertaking a 6-epoch, 6-band, imaging survey of the 20000 sq-degrees south of declination 0. Known as the "Southern Sky Survey", this program will observe in the Stromgren u, DDO-38, and Sloan g,r,i,z bands, and will cover timescales ranging from hours to years. In addition, a "5-second survey" will be taken under photometric conditions to provide a 6-colour photometric calibration of the southern sky between magnitudes 8 and 15. All photometric information and images will be publically available without proprietary period via a web-accessible database.
This work is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Australian Research Council, and through funding by the Australian National University.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://msowww.anu.edu.au/skymapper. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: brian@mso.anu.edu.au
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #2
© 2005. The American Astronomical Soceity.