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SkyMapper
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SkyMapper
Organization
RSAA
Location
Siding Spring Observatory
Altitude
1163 m
Wavelength
325–969 nm
Built
November 2007
First light
2008
Telescope style
Modified Cassegrain
Diameter
1.35 m
Angular resolution
1.1? median seeing limit
0.5? pixel size
Collecting area
1.16 m²
Focal length
6.2 m
Mounting
altitude/azimuth
Dome
11.5 m tall, 6.25 m dia
Website
www.mso.anu.edu.au/skymapper/
SkyMapper is a fully automated 1.35m wide-angle optical telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in northern New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the telescopes of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Australian National University (ANU). The telescope has a compact modified Cassegrain design with a large 0.69 m secondary mirror, which gives it a very wide field of view: its single, dedicated instrument, a 268-million pixel imaging camera, can photograph 5.7 square degrees of sky. The camera has six filters which span from ultraviolet to near infrared wavelengths.The SkyMapper telescope was built to carry out the Southern Sky Survey, which will image the entire southern sky several times over in SkyMapper's six spectral filters over the course of five years. This survey will be analogous to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey of the Northern hemisphere sky. It has several enhancements, including temporal coverage, more precise measurements of stellar properties and coverage of large parts of the plane of the Galaxy.The telescope and its camera were built by the ANU as a successor to the Great Melbourne Telescope at Mount Stromlo after that telescope was burnt in the 2003 Canberra bushfires. It was inaugurated by Minister Kim Carr and Governor of New South Wales Marie Bashir in 2009. The survey project is funded by the Australian Research Council through various grants. The project was also a finalist in The Australian's 2011 Innovation Challenge.
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Created By:
System
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