The USNO PMM Program
Abstract
At last count, the U.S. Naval Observatory's Precision Measuring Machine has digitized and processed 7,560,089,606,712 pixels from the Palomar, ESO, AAO, UKST, and Lick photographic sky survey plates, and 52-byte records have been computed for each of 6,648,074,159 detections. The pixel database occupies 1866 rolls of 8-mm tape (only 5,199,639,984,384 pixels were saved), and the detection database occupies 581 CD-ROMs housed in two jukeboxes. The PMM program's first catalog was USNO-A1.0 (see http://www.usno.navy.mil/pmm for details), and completion of its known tasks will take another two years. The presentation will include a brief description of the PMM, some of the lessons learned during the first 3.5 years of operation, and a discussion of the problems anticipated in going from G-rated products such as USNO-A to X-rated products such as public access to the pixel and detection databases.
- Publication:
-
Astrophysics and Algorithms
- Pub Date:
- 1998
- Bibcode:
- 1998asal.confE...2M