Astrometry of Large Sky Surveys

Astrometry with digital sky surveys: from SDSS to LSST

Major advances in our understanding of the Universe have historically come from dramatic improvements in our ability to accurately measure astronomical quantities. The astrometric observations obtained by modern digital sky surveys are enabling unprecedentedly massive and robust studies of the kinematics of the Milky Way. For example, the astrometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS...

Astrometry in Wide-field Surveys

We present a robust and fast algorithm for performing astrometry and source cross-identification on two dimensional point lists, such as between a catalogue and an astronomical image, or between two images. The method is based on minimal assumptions: the lists can be rotated, magnified and inverted with respect to each other in an arbitrary way. The algorithm is tailored to work efficiently on ...

Assessment of systematic chromatic errors that impact sub-1% photometric precision in large-area sky surveys

Meeting the science goals for many current and future ground-based optical large-area sky surveys requires that the calibrated broadband photometry is both stable in time and uniform over the sky to 1% precision or better. Past and current surveys have achieved photometric precision of 1%–2% by calibrating the survey’s stellar photometry with repeated measurements of a large number of stars obs...

SKICAT: A Machine Learning System for Automated Cataloging of Large Scale Sky Surveys

Galactic Stellar Populations in the Era of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Other Large Surveys

1Department of Astronomy, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195; email: [email protected] 2National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, Arizona 85719, and Department of Physics & Astronomy and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics ( JINA), Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824; email: [email protected] 3Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics...