SkyMapper

Details from Richard Scalzo, as of 12 August 2011.

Annual search period: SkyMapper will run all year.

Cadence: 3-4 days on average. Long-term SkyMapper operations will be divided into "main survey" and "bad seeing" components, with seeing conditions worse than about 1.8" (25% of the telescope time) being devoted to a rolling search for supernovae. About 5% of "main survey" time can be used to fill in holes in the cadence resulting from a long period of good seeing conditions. The survey will be dynamically scheduled each night by software, and will be able to adapt to changing seeing conditions over the course of a single night (i.e., scheduling partial nights for the SN search) based on preliminary reductions of images as they are taken.

Depth + Filters: ~20 (signal-to-noise = 5) in SDSS gri and a Stromgren-like v filter.

Status and start date: Some technical difficulties with the telescope and camera will delay start of normal operations until at least mid-September. The SN search pipeline also requires some work, mostly in the real/bogus classification and follow-up awareness components, and our goal is to have a functioning prototype which is ready to search by the time the telescope comes back online. After an engineering period to commission the search software infrastructure, we hope to start regular search operations by the end of 2011.

Length of survey and long term status: SkyMapper will run for five years (main survey + SN search).