Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
May 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21422902z&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #214, #229.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.733
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
The U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) is engaged in dedicated, astrometric, all-sky surveys. Scanning of all applicable Schmidt Survey plates lead to the USNO-B and NOMAD star catalogs reaching 20th magnitude on the 200-300 mas level. The final version of the USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog (UCAC) will be released later this year, containing about 80 million stars in the R = 8 to 16 magnitude range. Dedicated calibration observations and reduction techniques allow to control systematic position errors on the 10 mas level.
The first phase of the USNO Robotic Astrometric Telescope (URAT) project, nicknamed "U-mouse", utilizes the existing, completely re-modeled USNO "redlens" 20 cm aperture astrograph to provide 28 square degrees sky coverage per single exposure with 0.905 arcsec/pixel resolution. The URAT focal plane comprises 4 main CCDs (10.5k by 10.5k pixels each) and 4 smaller guide and focus chips in an LN2 dewar. Delivery of this camera from Semiconductor Technology Associates (STA) is expected in July 2009. Survey operations will be conducted from NOFS (northern) and CTIO (southern hemisphere). About 15-30 sky overlaps will be obtained from each site during 2 to 3 years of imaging to arrive at a catalog of positions, proper motions and parallaxes for stars in the R = 7 to 18 mag range with systematic errors expected to be smaller than those achieved by the UCAC program. Clocked anti-blooming is used to extend the dynamic range about 3 magnitudes beyond traditional saturation. Neutral density spots allow observations of naked eye stars. URAT will provide an improved, optical, celestial reference frame, in the pre-Gaia era, linking Hipparcos stars directly to extragalactic ICRF sources, with global block-adjustment procedures playing a key role.
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