The SkyMapper ASVO node is the primary access point to the SkyMapper data. The first version of the node was co-developed by the National Computing Infrastructure (NCI), Australian National University (ANU), and Intersect Australia Limited. The node has three major data releases:

  • Test Data Release (TDR) – July 2015

The Test Data Release was a preview of the Survey data, designed to show their characteristics, while also testing data access methods for images and catalogues. It covers approximately 60 square degrees near RA=13h 40m and Dec=-15 deg.

  • Early Data Release (EDR) – May 2016

The Early Data Release provided data from the Short Survey across one-third of the southern sky. EDR includes all fields observed between March 2014 and March 2015 where at least two visits of the telescope were made in near-photometric conditions. Each visit includes an exposure in all six filters, uvgriz.

  • First Data Release (DR1) – June 2017

The First Data Release provides data from the Shallow Survey across >98% of the southern sky, mostly covering the range from the South Celestial Pole to +2 deg in declination, with some extra coverage reaching +10 deg. DR1 includes fields observed between March 2014 and September 2015, with a number of quality cuts applied. Additionally, DR1 includes measurements from over 2.3 billion detections covering over 20,200 deg2 of the sky. They correspond to ~300 million unique astrophysical objects from magnitude 8 to 18 (complete to ~17.5 mag, depending on the filter).

Data is currently accessible through Virtual Observatory-compatible tools such as TOPCAT, and Aladin. The system supports the following VO Services:

More details are available on the data access page. An alternative web-interface is provided as well.

Technology currently used:

  • Python Django
  • Python CherryPy
  • Basic JavaScript using JQuery and D3JS.

Hardware arrangement:

Currently the node is hosted on a virtualized instance at the National Computing Infrastructure (NCI).

  • Database Server (8 CPUs, 32 GB).
  • Virtual Node for the user interface hosting (2 CPU, and 8 GB).
  • Storage is provided by NCI. For the early data release: 1.8 TB of table data (stored on an NCI virtual machine) and 19TB of compressed images (50TB uncompressed equivalent – stored on NCI’s g/data1 system). The node is expecting a data growth to approximately 8TB of table data and up to 200TB of images by the end of 2017.