Large Surveys with small telescopes: Past, present, and future - A scientific conference held in Bamberg from March 10 to 13, 2019
In the context of the digitisation project of astronomical plates funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) entitled “Digitalisierung astronomischer Fotoplatten und ihre Integration in das internationale Virtual Observatory”, a consortium of astronomers from the Hamburger Sternwarte, the Leibniz Institut für Astrophsik and the Dr. Remeis-Sternwarte in Bamberg organized a scientific conference entitled Large Surveys with small telescopes: Past, present, and future.
Participants from the Large Surveys with small telescopes Conference
About seventy astronomers from 16 countries around the globe met at the premises of the University of Bamberg to disclose synergies of historic astronomical observations stored on photographic plates with modern digital Sky surveys.
Large wide-field surveys have been carried out since more than a century, starting with the Carte du Ciel in the late nineteenth century and have been recorded on photographic plates. With the advent of CCD detectors monitoring the Sky became even more intense. Wide field surveys are carried out with small telescopes and cameras. Already with the Henry Draper Memorial project, spectroscopy became an important scientific technique for such surveys, early-on with objective prisms and latterly with multi-fiber instruments . Most of the ongoing surveys are dedicated to specific scientific aims, such as search for MACHOS, exoplanet transits or nearby asteroids, but provide data sets for a wide range of astrophysics research, such as binary light curves, stellar pulsations, and eruptions to name a few. Many future surveys will also be based on small telescopes, both on ground and in space.
The information stored in photographic plates distributed around the globe became accessible only recently, by digitization, calibration and integration into data bases such as DASCH or APPLAUSE.
Because a huge amount of data is piling up in the data bases of the different projects an important task is to combine the information and harvest it in an optimum way. To this end, the meeting aims to bring together researchers working on the photographic heritage, with those involved in ongoing and future digital surveys. Combing data sets requires in depth knowledge of calibration. Studying the objects requires the sophisticated tools of astroinformatics (big data, deep learning), which shall be addressed in the conference’ program.
The programme covered the following topics:
- Past: History, plate archives, spectroscopy, digitization, calibration, catalogs, data bases, VO integration, linkage to modern digital surveys
- Present: Digital surveys: Telescope (networks), robotic telescopes, photometry, astrometry, spectroscopy, catalogs, reduction and calibration pipelines, data base access, and VO integration.
- Future: Ground based optical surveys with small telescopes under developement. Link to space-based surveys, astroinformatics, big data, and machine learning
Proceedings:
The presentations are available through: https://www.plate-archive.org/applause/project/lswst/