Bohdan's Favorite Optical Sky Surveys
As a favor to Bohdan Paczynski, I have placed this list
of WWW sites with information on optical astronomical sky
surveys under my home page. We both enjoy learning of
new surveys, so please
let me know
if you would like us to add another.
- OGLE: the Optical Gravitational Lens Experiment, consists of
a large telescope in Chile and wide-area CCD camera which repeatedly
monitor a set of fields near the Milky Way's bulge.
- MACHO: the search for MAssive Compact Halo Objects,
has a large telescope in Australia and wide-area, mosaic CCD
camera; it looks at the LMC and the bulge of the Milky Way.
- EROS: the Experience pour la Recherche d'Objets Sombres, is a
French-led project to look for microlensing events; they have
a new instrument at ESO.
- DIRECT: a project headed by Krzysztof Stanek to
determine distances to M31 and M33 via eclipsing binary stars,
avoiding many of the rungs in the distance ladder. This is
really a survey of two OTHER galaxies, not our own.
- AAVSO: American Association of Variable Star Observers, is a group
of (mostly) visual observers who collect huge numbers of measurements
of bright variable stars. You can subscribe to the AAVSO News Flash
by sending E-mail to observations@aavso.org, or request
data from their voluminous archives by contacting
Janet Mattei, AAVSO Director, at aavso@aavso.org.
- VSNET: Variable Star NETwork, collects information world-wide, but
is run by astronomers in Japan. They have several mailing lists
and react very quickly to astronomical events.
- TASS: The Amateur Sky Survey, is a loose collection of mostly amateur
astromomers who are building a set of wide-angle drift-scan CCD
cameras and writing software to reduce, pool, and analyze the results
from several sites across the US.
- The
TASS home page contains background information, example images,
and software, as well as instructions for joining the TASS mailing list.
- Stardial is a stationary weather-proof electronic camera for
recording images of the sky at night autonomously. Stardial is
intended for education, primarily, but it may be of interest to
astronomers, amateur or professional, also. It is located on the roof
of the astronomy building on the campus of the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign.
- All Sky Automated Survey has the main goal of
photometric monitoring of approx.
10^7 stars brighter than magnitude 14 all over the sky.
The idea and founding sources are due to Prof. Bohdan Paczynski,
Princeton University; prototype device and software are being
developed by Dr. Grzegorz Pojmanski, Warsaw University.
- LONEOS Sky Survey is based at Lowell Observatory. It will
make a map of the entire sky visible from the site over a
period of several years, and concentrate on finding near-earth
asteroids.
Bohdan has written a paper on the use of large-scale optical
surveys,
The future of massive variability searches,
which you may read in its current preprint form:
Abstract only or
gzipped Postscript copy of the entire paper.
You might also want to check out the
AstroWeb's list of Astronomical Survey Projects.
This page maintained by Michael Richmond,
mwrsps@grace.rit.edu
Last modified Mar 16, 2000.