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Palomar-QUEST: A case study in designing sky surveys in the VO era

Matthew J. Graham·Roy Williams·S. G. Djorgovski·Ashish Mahabal·Charles Baltay·Dave Rabinowitz·Anne Bauer·Jeff Snyder·Nick Morgan·Peter Andrews·Alexander S. Szalay·Robert J. Brunner·Jim Musser
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Abstract

The advent of wide-area multicolour synoptic sky surveys is leading to data sets unprecedented in size, complexity and data throughput. VO technology offers a way to exploit these to the full but requires changes in design philosophy. The Palomar-QUEST survey is a major new survey being undertaken by Caltech, Yale, JPL and Indiana University to repeatedly observe 1/3 of the sky (~15000 sq. deg. between -27 < Dec <27 in seven passbands. Utilising the 48-inch Oschin Schmidt Telescope at the Palomar Observatory with the 112-CCD QUEST camera covering the full 4 x 4 sq. deg. field of view, it will generate \~1TB of data per month. In this paper, we review the design of QUEST as a VO resource, a federated data set and an exemplar of VO standards.

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Matthew J. Graham, Roy Williams, S. G. Djorgovski, Ashish Mahabal, Charles Baltay, Dave Rabinowitz, Anne Bauer, Jeff Snyder, Nick Morgan, Peter Andrews, Alexander S. Szalay, Robert J. Brunner, Jim Musser. 2004-02-25. Palomar-QUEST: A case study in designing sky surveys in the VO era. https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0402616

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