Category Archives: Discussion

Can you help me find a star?

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Carina Kan

We often receive email messages asking for help finding a star. In this post we will give instructions for displaying an image of a star in SkyView, as well as provide further tips for finding the star on a star chart and … Continue reading →

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Features in the Gallery: The GEICO Gecko?

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Tess Jaffe

One recent gallery entry shows — to me at least — a remarkable resemblance to the GEICO gecko. or you can see it a lot bigger in its gallery entry. This is a DSS blue image, and we don’t see … Continue reading →

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Approximate Projections and Raw Cutouts

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Tess Jaffe

One feature that we’ve added to the underlying SkyView code recently is the ability to create approximate projections.  Several surveys in SkyView, the DSSn and NEAT include distortions in the projection plane that mean that the data cannot be accurately … Continue reading →

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Features in the Gallery: Klingon Forcefields?

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Tess Jaffe

  Since there are more than 100 surveys in SkyView, it shouldn’t be surprising that we are not experts in the characteristics of each one. A blog reader noted that there is a very unusual feature in the WISE data … Continue reading →

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SkyView using Xamin

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Tess Jaffe

Recently the HEASARC released a new more powerful interface to its catalog and archive, Xamin. We have just updated SkyView so that SkyView catalog queries of tables in the HEASARC databases are now being made through this new Xamin interface … Continue reading →

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SkyView Surveys Summary: I

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Tess Jaffe

Recently we’ve been updating and systematizing some of the metadata we have on SkyView surveys, trying to make sure that we have consistent, quantitative description of each one. Some of the key metadata are the resolution of the survey on … Continue reading →

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What are people interested in? (2)

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Tess Jaffe

A few years ago we posted an image of the sky which showed what people have been looking at. Here’s an update giving the distribution of pixel centers for the last 10,000,000 or so SkyView images (about the last 18 … Continue reading →

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WISE versus IRAS

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Tess Jaffe

Just to see the incredible improvement WISE makes over the IRAS data here are two images of the same region (0.2×0.2 degrees at RA=2h 40m, Dec=20). The IRAS image (from the IRIS 12 micron survey) is very pixelated… There’s almost … Continue reading →

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How big is the universe?

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Tess Jaffe

Sometimes we can get a sense of the immensity of the universe from mundane things. The odometer on my 10 year old car is approaching 186,000 miles. That’s about as far as light goes in a single second. It takes … Continue reading →

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Features in the Gallery: Don’t look too close.

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Tess Jaffe

We recently had a query about features in the image . You can see it in the Gallery. There images seems to have a very sharp but colorful transition between the bottom left and top right, but there are also … Continue reading →

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