SkyMapper is a fully automated 1.35 m (4.4 ft) wide-angle

optical telescope An optical telescope is a telescope that gathers and focuses light mainly from the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, to create a magnified image for direct visual inspection, to make a photograph, or to collect data through electro ...

Siding Spring Observatory Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran, New South Wales, Australia, part of the Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics (RSAA) at the Australian National University (ANU), incorporates the Anglo-Australian Telescope along with a coll ...

in northern

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, Australia. It is one of the telescopes of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the

Australian National University The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies and ...

(ANU). The telescope has a compact modified Cassegrain design with a large 0.69 m

secondary mirror A secondary mirror (or secondary) is the second deflecting or focusing mirror element in a reflecting telescope. Light gathered by the primary mirror is directed towards a focal point typically past the location of the secondary. Secondary mirr ...

, which gives it a very wide field of view: its single, dedicated instrument, a 268-million pixel imaging camera, can photograph 5.7 square degrees of sky. The camera has six light filters which span from

ultraviolet Ultraviolet (UV) is a form of electromagnetic radiation with wavelength from 10 nanometer, nm (with a corresponding frequency around 30 Hertz, PHz) to 400 nm (750 Hertz, THz), shorter than that of visible light, but longer than ...

near infrared Infrared (IR), sometimes called infrared light, is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than those of visible light. It is therefore invisible to the human eye. IR is generally understood to encompass wavelengths from around ...

wavelengths. The SkyMapper telescope was built to carry out the Southern Sky Survey, which will image the entire southern sky several times over in SkyMapper's six spectral filters over the course of five years. This survey will be analogous to the

Sloan Digital Sky Survey The Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS is a major multi-spectral imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey using a dedicated 2.5-m wide-angle optical telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, United States. The project began in 2000 a ...

of the Northern hemisphere sky. It has several enhancements, including temporal coverage, more precise measurements of stellar properties and coverage of large parts of the plane of the Galaxy. The telescope and its camera were built by the ANU as a successor to the

Great Melbourne Telescope The Great Melbourne Telescope was built by Thomas Grubb in Dublin, Ireland in 1868, and installed at the Melbourne Observatory in Melbourne, Australia in 1869. In 1945 that Observatory closed and the telescope was sold and moved to the Mount Strom ...

Mount Stromlo Mount Stromlo (formerly Mount Strom ) is a mountain with an elevation of that is situated in the Australian Capital Territory, Australia. The mountain is most notable as the location of the Mount Stromlo Observatory. The mountain forms part ...

after that telescope was burnt in the

2003 Canberra bushfires The 2003 Canberra bushfires caused severe damage to the suburbs and outer areas of Canberra, the capital city of Australia, during 18–22 January 2003. Almost 70% of the Australian Capital Territory's (ACT) pastures, pine plantations, and nat ...

. It was inaugurated by Minister

Kim Carr Kim John Carr (born 2 July 1955) is an Australian former politician who served as a Senator for Victoria between 1993 and 2022. Representing the Labor Party, he was a minister in the Rudd and Gillard Governments. Carr is a graduate of the Un ...

and

Governor of New South Wales The governor of New South Wales is the viceregal representative of the Australian monarch, King Charles III, in the state of New South Wales. In an analogous way to the governor-general of Australia at the national level, the governors of the ...

Marie Bashir Dame Marie Roslyn Bashir (born 1 December 1930) is the former and second longest-serving Governor of New South Wales. Born in Narrandera, New South Wales, Bashir graduated from the University of Sydney in 1956 and held various medical positio ...

in 2009. The survey project is funded by the

Australian Research Council The Australian Research Council (ARC) is the primary non-medical research funding agency of the Australian Government, distributing more than in grants each year. The Council was established by the ''Australian Research Council Act 2001'', ...

through various grants. The project was also a finalist in ''

The Australian ''The Australian'', with its Saturday edition, ''The Weekend Australian'', is a broadsheet newspaper published by News Corp Australia since 14 July 1964.Bruns, Axel. "3.1. The active audience: Transforming journalism from gatekeeping to gatew ...

's'' 2011 Innovation Challenge.

Telescope

The telescope and its dome were built by Electro Optics Systems of

Canberra Canberra ( ) is the capital city of Australia. Founded following the federation of the colonies of Australia as the seat of government for the new nation, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The ci ...

. As the telescope has an alt-azimuth mounting, its dome is compact and snug: the minimum clearance as the telescope moves is about 4 cm.

Camera and filters

The camera is a tiled mosaic of 32 CCD chips, each with 2k x 4k pixels, arranged in a 4 x 8 array. The six filters used to take observations are set in a

photometric system In astronomy, a photometric system is a set of well-defined passbands (or optical filters), with a known sensitivity to incident radiation. The sensitivity usually depends on the optical system, detectors and filters used. For each photometric sy ...

partly similar to that of the Sloan survey, to aid in comparison of the two sets of observations. These similar filters are the visible and near-infrared passbands named g, r, i and z. SkyMapper has additional, distinctive ultraviolet filters, a Strömgren system-like u, and a unique narrow v near 4000Å. These two filters bracket the

Balmer jump The Balmer jump, Balmer discontinuity, or Balmer break is the difference of intensity of the stellar continuum spectrum on either side of the limit of the Balmer series of hydrogen, at approximately 364.5 nm. It is caused by electrons being com ...

of stars' spectra, and allow the survey to detect the population of metal-poor stars within the Milky Way.

Data

The stars, galaxies and asteroids observed in the survey (expected to be about a billion) will be extracted from each image and made publicly available via an Internet query form. The main dataset of the survey will be stored and processed at the ANU supercomputing facility. The star SMSS J031300.36-670839.3, one of the oldest known stars in the Universe, was discovered by a team led by Australian National University astronomers in early 2014.

References

External links

The SkyMapper projectSurveyThe SkyMapper Transient SurveySupernova Sighting, citizen science project at the Zooniverse
{{Portal bar, Astronomy, Stars, Spaceflight, Outer space, Solar System Telescopes Astronomical surveys Siding Spring Observatory 2008 establishments in Australia

Telescope

Camera and filters

Data

See also

References

External links