SKY-MAP.ORG / WIKISKY » DSS2

Still believing in aliens invasion in 2012?

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 19:20:39 +0000

The news about so-called space ships found by SETI shaking internet community for more than a month now (though origin of the news I found on some blogs and youtube video are more than a year old). There was several debunking articles from respective authors, but the rumor still around and time to time we are getting e-mails and phone calls from worrying visitors of sky-map about “suspicious objects”. I just stumbled on SETI press release with an explanation. Check it out – Internet Rumor of Inbound 2012 Spaceships Untrue: NO Spaceships Headed for Earth

Another good article on Bad Astronomer blog by Phil Plat who particularly explains the imaging artifacts on Digitized Sky Survey you can find here.

Here’s one of the recent discoveries by our visitors: (06h34m46.99s, +51°04′49.0″). It’s just another image arifact, but looks pretty cool . Scroll down to the left for more “objects”

____________

January 2011 status update

admin — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:43:49 +0000

End of 2010 was quite hot for our servers. Visitors traffic grown from usual 300,000 visits per month to over 1,500,000 visits in December alone. Our poor 6 years old servers reached it’s capacities on all ends – processors power, disks space and IO performance. We had to shut down some services in order to keep our servers up.

In other news, Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) last week released new version – SDSS-III (DR8). It is most significant update since probably DR3. It now covers 1/3 of whole sky. In addition all existing fields has been rebuild with higher quality. The imaging survey contains about a million fields 3 mega pixels each, that totals to 3 Terra pixels of imaging data (compare to 1 Terra pixel of whole sky DSS2 sky survey). We are currently working on adding new SDSS data to our sky map.

____________

About “Giant spaceships heading towards Earth” news

admin — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 03:32:56 +0000

As I mentioned in previous post our site flooded with visitors looking for space ships on the sky map. The majority of traffic is coming from Russia and Eastern Europe. I found several news site posted the news about some SETI officials pointed on some images of space ships on sky map. I tried to find the source of that claim and found this 11 month-old video on youtube:

It looks like someone made a joke linking recent news about discontinue SETI program and that video with “space ship”.
Here’s more recent video:

According to our traffic jump, the news caused nation-wide paranoia. Wow, the power of mass media!

0-zoom images updated

WikiSky — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 05:17:19 +0000

DSS2 all sky image (aitoff projection)

SDSS all sky image (aitoff projection)

RASS3 all sky image (aitoff projection)

GALEX all sky image (aitoff projection)

Astrophoto all sky image (aitoff projection)

IRAS (infrared) all sky image (aitoff projection)

H-Alhpa all sky image (aitoff projection)

We have updated images at top zoom level (0). We already had 0-zoom images for IRAS, H-Alpha, astrophoto and SKY-MAP surveys. New images include DSS2, SDSS, RASS3 and GALEX surveys. Also astrophoto updated with latest images. The top level images represent whole sky in aitoff projection with center in R.A.=12^h, Dec.=0°

____________

GALEX

WikiSky — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:03:32 +0000

Helix Nebula in ultraviolet (GALEX)

M33 (Triangulum Galaxy) on GALEX

We’re about to finish work on new high resolution all sky survey – GALEX. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer is an orbiting space telescope observing galaxies in ultraviolet light across 10 billion years of cosmic history. GALEX GR4 imaging data contains about 31,200 2 color band frames with round image area of 2900 pixels in diameter each. It’s our third largest survey with its 200,000 megapixles of data after SDSS (1,100,000 MPixels) and DSS2 (800,000 MPixels). For now GALEX survey is available on two servers – server3.wikisky.org and server7.wikisky.org

____________