Astronomical Surveys - List of Sky Surveys

List of Sky Surveys

• Optical
  • Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey
  • National Geographic Society – Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (NGS–POSS) - survey of the northern sky on photographic plates, 1948–1958
  • Digitized Sky Survey - optical all-sky survey created from digitized photographic plates, 1994
  • Sloan Digital Sky Survey - an optical and spectroscopic survey, 2000-2006 (first pass)
  • Photopic Sky Survey - a survey with 37,440 individual exposures, 2010-2011.
  • Palomar Distant Solar System Survey (PDSSS)

• Infrared
  • Infrared Astronomical Satellite did an all sky survey at 12, 25, 60, and 100 μm, 1983
  • The 2-micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS), a ground based all sky survey at J, H, and Ks bands (1.25, 1.65, and 2.17 μm) 1997-2001
  • Akari (Astro-F) a Japanese mid and far infrared all-sky survey satellite, 2006–2008
  • Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer was launched in December 2009 to begin a survey of 99% of the sky at wavelengths of 3.3, 4.7, 12, and 23 μm. The telescope is over a thousand times as sensitive as previous infrared surveys. The initial survey, consisting of each sky position imaged at least eight times, was completed by July 2010.
  • SCUBA-2 All Sky Survey

• Radio
  • HIPASS - Radio survey, the first blind HI survey to cover the entire southern sky. 1997-2002
  • Ohio Sky Survey - Over 19,000 radio sources at 1415 MHz. 1965-1973.
  • NVSS - Survey at 1.4 GHz mapping the sky north of -40 deg
  • FIRST - Survey to look for faint radio sources at twenty cms.(see http://sundog.stsci.edu/index.html )

• Gamma-ray
  • Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly referred to as the "Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST)." 2008–present; the goal for the telescope's lifetime is 10 years.

• Multi-wavelength surveys
  • GAMA - the Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey (see http://gama-survey.org) combines data from a number of ground- and space-based observatories together with a large redshift survey, performed at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The resulting dataset aims to be a comprehensive resource for studying the physics of the galaxy population and underlying mass structures in the recent universe.
  • GOODS - The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey.
  • COSMOS - The Cosmic Evolution Survey

(The latter two surveys are joining together observations obtained from space with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the XMM-Newton satellite, with a large set of observations obtained with ground-based telescopes).

• Planned
  • Pan-STARRS - a proposed 4-telescope large-field survey system to look for transient and variable sources
  • Large Synaptic Survey Telescope - a proposed very large telescope designed to repeatedly survey the whole sky that is visible from its location