Message from Santa: DR2 is on its way | 21 Dec 2018

"The heavy load made the sleigh a bit slow", we heard a spokesperson of the reindeers say. "The data were placed under a tree at NCI, but the scientists of Australia will have to wait a little before unwrapping them", the delivery crew added. "We were riding without seatbelts, which made the journey twice as fast", revealed an insider, who prefers to remain unnamed. "Just hours after the delivery the sleigh crashed, wiping all traces of the goodies it carried." After a pause he added, "a day earlier and we would have gone back to the North Pole to wrap it all up ...

ASVO User Preferences Survey online | 27 Sep 2018

SkyMapper is a member of the All-Sky Virtual Observatory (ASVO) project, which aims to federate astronomical datasets from the Australian astronomical community.

Users of all ASVO nodes (including SkyMapper) are being invited to provide feedback on each node, and the ASVO as a whole, via the ASVO User Preferences Survey 2018: https://goo.gl/forms/0tuSrMoO3nFvRn0k1

The collected responses will inform aspects of the current development and potential future functionality of the ASVO nodes. The survey takes approximately 15 minutes to complete, and your time and effort will help ensure that ASVO is best positioned to meet the needs of ...

Website improvements released | 13 Jul 2018

We're pleased to announce that significant new functionality has been added to the SkyMapper website. Upgrades include:

• The Marz spectrum viewer (https://github.com/Samreay/Marz) has been incorporated into the website. This version of Marz allows users to load spectra from URLs, as well as local files on disk.
• We've added a new Object Viewer, which allows users to search for SkyMapper object IDs, as well as view a summary page for each object. Summary pages contain the core information about the object, a selection of images, and information from cross-matched catalogues.
• Cone search requests made via the website ...

Cross-matching Gaia DR2 and GALAH DR2.1 | 4 Jul 2018

The SkyMapper DR1 catalogue has now been cross-matched against both Gaia DR2 and GALAH DR2.1, with the two tables also being available for TAP queries in the 'ext' schema.

The 1.6 billion Gaia DR2 sources have been cross-matched with SkyMapper DR1, with the results appearing in the gaia_dr2_id1 and gaia_dr2_id2 columns in the dr1.master table, which links the SkyMapper object to the closest and second-closest Gaia DR2 sources, respectively. In addition, the ext.gaia_dr2 table has been augmented with its own gaia_dr2_id1 and gaia_dr2_id2 columns, which are the two closest sources when cross-matching Gaia DR2 against itself.

For ...

Maintenance Period - 2 July 2018 (Complete) | 29 Jun 2018

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) will be undergoing quarterly maintenance on 2 July 2018 (AEST). During this time, we anticipate the image cutout service of the SkyMapper node of the ASVO to be unavailable. The cone search and TAP query services may also be unavailable for part of that day.

We apologise for any inconvenience.