Time for another progress update on the Astrobin Community Survey.
The aim of the project is to complete a fairly deep image of the entire sky at 10 x 10" resolution. The most commonly used setup is a 135 mm Samyang or similar telephone lens with an APS-C one-shot camera. Allowing for overlaps for stitching purposes, a total of 1120 fields are needed to cover the entire sky. Thanks to the efforts of all contributors, we have now completed 291 fields, or just shy of 26% of the entire sky.
The progress image is at one tenth of final scale (100 x 100" pixels) and shows all completed fields on an equal-area Mollweide projection. The final survey dataset will be in excess of 5 gigapixels. Custom software is being developed to handle the data reduction, including alignment, colour normalisation and background correction.
We're always on the lookout for volunteers to help with the project. If you have a wide-field setup (ideally covering about 9 x 6 degrees of sky, and with a pixel resolution of better than 10") and a reasonably dark site (B4 or better) then please get in touch with any of the collaborators. So far, the southern hemisphere team is leading the race, so we're particularly keen to find some help from the northern hemisphere! You can contribute as little as one field or as many as you would like.
For more information about the project, visit the ABC Survey Forum page at
Astrobin Community Survey - AstroBin. For details of fields that still need an image see
Astrobin All Sky Survey field management tool 6x9 - Google Sheets.
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