The SkyMapper Telescope and The Southern Sky Survey

Abstract This paper presents the design and science goals for the SkyMapper telescope. SkyMapper is a 1.3-m telescope featuring a 5.7-square-degree field-of-view Cassegrain imager commissioned for the Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. It is located at Siding Spring Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia and will see first light in late 2007. The imager possesses 16 384 × 16 384 0.5-arcsec pixels. The primary scientific goal of the facility is to perform the Southern Sky Survey, a six-colour and multi-epoch (four-hour, one-day, one-week, one-month and one-year sampling) photometric survey of the southerly 2π sr to g ∼23 mag. The survey will provide photometry to better than 3% global accuracy and astrometry to better than 50 milliarcsec. Data will be supplied to the community as part of the Virtual Observatory effort. The survey will take five years to complete.

[1]  B. Zuckerman,et al.  Identification of a Nearby Stellar Association in theHipparcos Catalog: Implications for Recent, Local Star Formation , 2000, astro-ph/0002461.

[2]  Eugene A. Magnier,et al.  The Elixir System: Data Characterization and Calibration at the Canada‐France‐Hawaii Telescope , 2004 .

[3]  Vol Xiii,et al.  Astronomical Society of the Pacific , 1937, Nature.

[4]  K. S. Russell,et al.  Seeing Measurements at Freeling Heights and Siding Spring Observatory , 1995, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

[5]  Christopher W. Stubbs,et al.  Preliminary Results from Detector-Based Throughput Calibration of the CTIO Mosaic Imager and Blanco Telescope Using a Tunable Laser , 2006, astro-ph/0609260.

[6]  The first stars in the Universe , 2006, astro-ph/0604050.

[7]  D. Jewitt,et al.  Discovery of the candidate Kuiper belt object 1992 QB1 , 1993, Nature.

[8]  Edwin A. Valentijn,et al.  The Future of Photometric, Spectrophotometric and Polarimetric Standardization , 2007 .

[9]  C. Torres,et al.  A New Association of Post-T Tauri Stars near the Sun , 2000, astro-ph/0005579.

[10]  A. Loeb,et al.  A large neutral fraction of cosmic hydrogen a billion years after the Big Bang , 2004, Nature.

[11]  S. Cassisi,et al.  A Large Stellar Evolution Database for Population Synthesis Studies. II. Stellar Models and Isochrones for an α-enhanced Metal Distribution , 2006 .

[12]  Z. Ivezic,et al.  Solar system objects observed in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey commissioning data , 2001 .

[13]  V. Hill,et al.  First stars V - Abundance patterns from C to Zn and supernova yields in the early Galaxy , 2003, astro-ph/0311082.

[14]  D. Rabinowitz,et al.  Direct measurement of the size of 2003 UB313 , 2005, astro-ph/0604245.

[15]  et al,et al.  A Survey of z > 5.8 Quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. I. Discovery of Three New Quasars and the Spatial Density of Luminous Quasars at z ∼ 6 , 2001, astro-ph/0108063.

[16]  J. Beletic,et al.  Scientific detectors for astronomy : the beginning of a new era , 2004 .

[17]  James E. Gunn,et al.  A NEW FOUR-COLOR INTERMEDIATE-BAND PHOTOMETRIC SYSTEM. , 1976 .

[18]  E. Bertin,et al.  SExtractor: Software for source extraction , 1996 .

[19]  Robert Jedicke,et al.  Pan-STARRS: A Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Array , 2002, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[20]  Edward W. Dunham,et al.  The Discovery Channel Telescope: a wide-field telescope in Northern Arizona , 2004, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[21]  Klaus Reif,et al.  The Omegacam Shutter , 2004 .

[22]  Chadwick A. Trujillo,et al.  Properties of the Trans-Neptunian Belt: Statistics from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Survey , 2001 .

[23]  B. Krauskopf,et al.  Proc of SPIE , 2003 .

[24]  Francois Ochsenbein,et al.  Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) XIII , 2004 .

[25]  Alexander S. Szalay,et al.  Evidence for Reionization at z ∼ 6: Detection of a Gunn-Peterson Trough in a z = 6.28 Quasar , 2001, astro-ph/0108097.

[26]  The Core Density of Dark Matter Halos: A Critical Challenge to the ΛCDM Paradigm? , 1999, astro-ph/9908114.

[27]  J. Bahcall,et al.  Models for the Galaxy and the Predicted Star Counts , 1979 .

[28]  Carlos E. C. J. Gabriel,et al.  Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems Xv , 2022 .

[29]  Bruce A. Peterson,et al.  On the Density of Neutral Hydrogen in Intergalactic Space , 1965 .

[30]  Leaflets of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific , 1934, Nature.

[31]  Ben Zuckerman,et al.  Young Stars Near the Sun , 2004 .

[32]  E. Feigelson,et al.  A Radio Survey of Older T Tauri Stars in the η Chamaeleontis Cluster , 1999, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

[33]  James W. Beletic,et al.  Scientific Detectors for Astronomy , 2004 .

[34]  Donald W. Sweeney,et al.  Project status of the 8.4-m LSST , 2004, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[35]  Scott J. Kenyon,et al.  Accretion in the Early Kuiper Belt II. Fragmentation , 1999 .

[36]  R. Rosenfeld.  Nature , 2009, Otolaryngology--head and neck surgery : official journal of American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.

[37]  E. al.,et al.  The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical summary , 2000, astro-ph/0006396.

[38]  Takeo Minezaki,et al.  Nucleosynthetic signatures of the first stars , 2005, Nature.

[39]  T. Forveille,et al.  X-ray and molecular emission from the nearest region of recent star formation. , 1997, Science.