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Pan-STARRS Survey: Mosaic of the Northern Sky
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Caption: This circular mosaic was created from thousands of sky images taken by the Pan-STARRS Observatory, a 1.8-meter telescope located on the volcano Haleakalā on Maui, Hawai`i. The centre of the circle marks the north celestial pole, while the outer boundary corresponds to a declination of −30 degrees — the southern limit of the survey from that location. Each part of this image was visited multiple times during the survey with each location imaged in five different colors with multiple images per color to catch objects changing in brightness and to find moving objects such as asteroids. This dataset is a powerful example of an astronomical survey, in which the sky is systematically photographed to build large, uniform catalogs of celestial objects.
The wide, bright band running roughly from top to bottom is the Milky Way, with the Galactic centre appearing near the lower edge where the glow is strongest. Across the image are hundreds of millions of detected sources, most of them stars within our own galaxy, along with many distant galaxies in the background. Surveys like Pan-STARRS are essential for studying the structure of the Milky Way and for discovering new objects across vast areas of the sky.
Credit: Richard White (STScI), Pan-STARRS1 Science Consortium
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Glosar de termeni:
Astronomical Survey
License: Public Domain Public Domain icons
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