The palomar-quest survey

摘要: Palomar-Quest (PQ; http://www. astro. caltech. edu/pq/) is a major new digital synoptic sky survey which uses the 112-CCD Quest2 camera at the Palomar Observatory's 48-inch Samuel Oschin Schmidt telescope. The survey covers the sky in the range-25 o< δ<+ 25 o in dithered drift scan strips∼ 4.6 o wide, with an area coverage of∼ 500 deg 2 per clear night, in 4 filters. The scans are obtained in Cousins UBRI and SDSS r'i'z'z'bands, with at least two passes obtained each year with each filter set, providing time baselines ranging from minutes (from one CCD to the next) to days, months, and years; and in federation with older sky surveys, up to a few decades. The limiting magnitudes in coadded data for a single season are comparable to SDSS. As a separate effort, the telescope and camera are used by groups at JPL (NEAT) and Caltech, in a point-and-stare mode, for exploration of the Solar system; these data …