A team of scientists at the Australian National University has created the most comprehensive map of the southern sky ever.
The Orion Nebula in the new map of the southern sky. Image credit: Australian National University.
The new map of the southern sky includes about 70,000 individual images.
It captures nearly 300 million stars and galaxies and is available through an online portal.
“The map was created using SkyMapper, a 1.3-m telescope at Siding Spring Observatory that is creating a full record of the southern sky for astronomers internationally,” said lead researcher Dr. Christian Wolf.
“SkyMapper’s special filters probe light across a range of colors beyond what the human eye can see, reaching into the near-UV and the near-IR,” added team member Dr. Christopher Onken.
“This abundant color information is crucially important to search for astronomical ‘needles in the haystack’ among the vast number of stars in this map.”
The map was created with support from the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Centre in France, the Australian Research Council, Australian Astronomy Limited and the National Computational Infrastructure at the Australian National University.
“We provided a treasure map for astronomers to find many new interesting objects in the southern sky because of the range of color bands available in images,” Dr. Onken said.
“The map of the southern sky we’ve released to the world today is the best ever created, but this is only the beginning of a 5-year program to capture it in all its splendor,” Dr. Wolf said.
“The final map will show stars and galaxies that are up to 50 times fainter than the limits of this map.”
SkyMapper’s camera has nearly 270 megapixels and the faintest objects visible in the final map will be over one million times fainter than those visible to the naked human eye on a dark night.
