Pan-STARRS Releases Largest Digital Sky Survey to the World

[bystander]

Pan-STARRS Releases Largest Digital Sky Survey to the World
STScI | IfA | CfA | 2016 Dec 19

This compressed view of the entire sky visible from Hawaii by the Pan-STARRS1 Observatory is the result of half a million exposures, each about 45 seconds in length, taken over a period of 4 years. The shape comes from making a map of the celestial sphere, like a map of the Earth, but leaving out the southern quarter. The disk of the Milky Way looks like a yellow arc, and the dust lanes show up as reddish brown filaments. The background is made up of billions of faint stars and galaxies. If printed at full resolution, the image would be 1.5 miles long, and you would have to get close and squint to see the detail. Credit: Danny Farrow, Pan-STARRS1 Science Consortium and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics

---

The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, in conjunction with the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA) in Honolulu, Hawaii, is publicly releasing data today from Pan-STARRS -- the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System -- the world’s largest digital sky survey. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is among the partners who contributed to the Pan-STARRS1 Surveys.

“The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys allow anyone to access millions of images and use the database and catalogs containing precision measurements of billions of stars and galaxies,” said Dr. Ken Chambers, Director of the Pan-STARRS Observatories. “Pan-STARRS has made discoveries from near Earth objects and Kuiper belt objects in the solar system to lonely planets between the stars; it has mapped the dust in three dimensions in our galaxy and found new streams of stars; and it has found new kinds of exploding stars and distant quasars in the early universe.”

“With this release we anticipate that scientists -- as well as students and even casual users -- around the world will make many new discoveries about the universe from the wealth of data collected by Pan-STARRS,” Chambers added.

The four years of data comprise 3 billion separate sources, including stars, galaxies, and various other objects. The immense collection contains 2 petabytes of data, which is equivalent to one billion selfies, or one hundred times the total content of Wikipedia.

Pan-STARRS Releases Catalogue of 3 Billion Astronomical Sources
Max Planck Institute for Astronomy | Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics | 2016 Dec 19

[bystander]

World's Largest Digital Sky Survey Issues Biggest Astronomical Data Release Ever
Institute for Astronomy | University of Hawaii
NASA | STScI | HubbleSite | 2019 Jan 28

Pan-STARRS releases 1.6 petabytes of data from its four-year survey

Pan-STARRS Sky Survey ~ Credit: R. White (STScI) and the PS1 Science Consortium

---

The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, in conjunction with the University of Hawai'i Institute for Astronomy (IfA), is releasing the second edition of data from Pan-STARRS — the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System — the world's largest digital sky survey. This second release contains over 1.6 petabytes of data (a petabyte is 1015 bytes or one million gigabytes), making it the largest volume of astronomical information ever released. The amount of imaging data is equivalent to two billion selfies, or 30,000 times the total text content of Wikipedia. The catalog data is 15 times the volume of the Library of Congress.

The Pan-STARRS observatory consists of a 1.8-meter telescope equipped with a 1.4-billion-pixel digital camera, located at the summit of Haleakalā, on Maui. Conceived and developed by the IfA, it embarked on a digital survey of the sky in visible and near-infrared light in May 2010. Pan-STARRS was the first survey to observe the entire sky visible from Hawai'i multiple times in many colors of light. One of the survey's goals was to identify moving, transient, and variable objects, including asteroids that could potentially threaten the Earth. The survey took approximately four years to complete, scanning the sky 12 times in five filters. This second data release provides, for the first time, access to all of the individual exposures at each epoch of time. This will allow astronomers and public users of the archive to search the full survey for high-energy explosive events in the cosmos, discover moving objects in our own solar system, and explore the time domain of the universe. ...