Researchers have made the biggest ever survey of the night sky openly accessible, providing a classic data set of planetary objects that took 4 years to put-together. The Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) task signifies about half a million compound photographs of the night-sky as seen from Hawaii, and now astronauts have initiated making the whole reserve free to download for anybody who wants to discover space from the comfort of home.
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| Danny Farrow/Pan-STARRS1 Science Consortium/Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physicscaption |
Researchers have made the biggest ever survey of the night sky openly accessible, providing a classic data set of planetary objects that took 4 years to put-together. The Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) task signifies about half a million compound photographs of the night-sky as seen from Hawaii, and now astronauts have initiated making the whole reserve free to download for anybody who wants to discover space from the comfort of home. "The Pan-STARRS-1 analyses allow anyone to access millions of images and use the catalogues and database comprising accurate calculations of billions of galaxies and stars," said by Ken Chambers (director of the Pan-STARRS Observatories). "By this release we forestall that students and even casual users as well as researchers everywhere in the world will make many new detections about the Universe from the treasure of data gathered by Pan-STARRS."
The Pan-STARRS started tasks in May 2010, using PS1 (1.8 m) telescope. Situated at the peak of Haleakalā in Hawaii, Pan-STARRS1 collected photograph of the night sky in near and visible infrared light. And those photographs are tremendously comprehensive, given the telescope is fitted out with a digital camera (1.4 gigapixel), the supreme powerful digital camera ever built. It records approximately 1.4 billion pixels per photograph. Each image with that resolution captures a area of sky about 36 times the part of the Moon as seen from the Earth. With new shots taken every 30 seconds for 4 years, and each image determining a heavy 2 gigabytes or so, the overall collection adds up to an crazy 2 petabytes which are equal to 2 million gigabytes or 2,000 terabytes. As the astronauts describe, that is comparable to around 100 times the total content of Wikipedia or 1 billion selfies. But apart from the almost bizarre digital size of the data set, even more astonishing is the richness of planetary phenomena it comprises. The visual record is made of 3 billion different image bases, containing both distant and near galaxies and stars added with this space objects closer to earth.
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| The Pan-STARRS1 Observatory on Halealakala, Maui. Credit: Rob Ratkowski |
Chambers said "Pan-STARRS have made findings from Kuiper-Belt Objects and Near Earth Objects in the Solar System to lonely planets between the stars." "It has charted the dust in three dimensions in our galaxy and exposed new rivers of stars; and it has discovered new types of distant quasars and exploding stars in the Universe." The program of Pan-STARRS was the work of 10 institutions in 4 countries, supported by NSF (National Science Foundation) and NASA. But while the researchers working on the task may have already exposed a lot so far, they know the data set will be even more valuable and productive once it is released upon publically. Chambers said that "The findings that come after this release, there will be more of them than the things we have been doing over the past five to six years, and that is part of the point. This is a resource actually is a wealth of data to be released. Researchers and people going through it will be able to find a treasure of new things that we can-not even visualize that is why we are realizing it publically."
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