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FollowNERSC Hosts Digital Stargazing Portal
June 4, 2015
Courtesy of DECam Legacy Survey
Even non-scientists can now browse sky survey images hosted at NERSC. The DECam Legacy Survey has published the first in a series of web-based catalogs that will offer an update to images of the night sky originally taken with the 15-year-old camera of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In the spirit of the new information age, the survey will share frequent updates on its public website.
The Sky Viewer lets anyone with web access explore the contents of the universe, choosing between false-color image, theoretical models of the sky, or the differences between the two. Similar exploration tools exist for the image archives of Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Hubble telescope. However, these data became publicly available only after a period of restricted use by a limited group of researchers. In this case, "raw images will appear the day after they were taken, and we plan on releasing processed versions every three to six months,” says David Schlegel of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who initiated the new project together with Arjun Dey, a staff astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.“ »Try the Sky Viewer. Read more.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.
