Transients in the Griffith Big Picture
This page presents information about transients found in the Griffith observatory Mosaic Big Picture.
The Palomar-Quest digital sky survey and Caltech’s Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) are producing a digital sky survey image for a 152 foot long by 20 foot high mural, which will be the centerpiece of the new exhibit hall at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. This image, currently referred to as the “Big Picture”, will be a continuous swath 15.2 deg wide by 2.0 deg high, going through the center of the Virgo Cluster. The image mosaic used to generate it has 136,800 by 18,000 pixels, in 3 colors, and is probably the largest astronomical digital image ever produced. Reproduced in color, on a baked, steel-backed porcelain tile, the mural will last many decades, if not centuries. The raw data consists of more than 200 Gigabytes of raw scans obtained over about 20 separate nights. Using 16 Hewlett-Packard dual-processor nodes at CACR, the processing included multiple passes of calibration and cleaning of instrument artifacts, reprojection to a common grid of pixels on the sky, and averaging. The Big Picture utilizes technologies and standards pioneered by the National Virtual Observatory (NVO). It will also be used for the NVO outreach effort by providing corresponding multi-wavelength mosaics from other surveys. It will serve as an education and public outreach portal not only for astronomy and physical science, but also for the information technologies used to generate, process and interpret such images. The images were taken as part of the Palomar-Quest experiment with the Samuel Oschin Telescope.
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