3.15. Optical and UV Surveys

A list of optical and UV surveys was generated after IAU's Symposium 179. These can be accessed at http://pixela.stsci.edu/iauwg/survey_url.html. Among them are:

3.15.1 Optical

• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) (http://www.sdss.org) will be a complete survey of steradians using 30 2048 x 2048 CCDs in five bands and two fiber optics spectrographs. It will consist of a photometric catalog of 10⁸ galaxies, 10⁸ stars and 10⁶ quasars; a spectroscopic catalog including emission and absorption lines, images in five bands and 1-d spectra of 10⁶ galaxies, 10⁵ stars, 10⁵ quasars and 10⁴ clusters. As the size of the SDSS will probably exceed 10¹⁰ bytes, maintaining, distributing and querying it will be quite a challenge.
• ESO slice project (http://boas5.bo.astro.it/~cappi/esokp.html) is a galaxy redshift covering 30 square degrees near the South Galactic Pole, complete to b_J = 19.4. It includes the redshifts of 3,000 galaxies.
• Two degree Field (2dF) QSO redshift survey will determine the large scale tridimensional structure of the universe up to z ~ 0.1 by measuring the redshift of 250,000 galaxies. In addition, spectra of 30,000 quasars will be obtained. This survey may be located at either http://www.aao.gov.au/local/www/rs/qso_surv.html or alternatively at http://www.aao.gov.au/local/www/rs/qso_surv.html

3.15.2 UV

• FOCA was a small airborne telescope which surveyed 70 square degrees at 2000Å with an angular resolution of 12" and 20". The catalog which was generated found at http://www.astrsp-mrs.fr/~xbig/foca/node2.html includes galaxy counts and color distributions for sources between magnitudes 15 and 18.5
• Alexis (http://alexis-www.lanl.gov is an EUV/X-ray satellite surveying the sky to map the diffuse soft X-ray background, to study flaring stars and make observations of EUV sources. Any object detected is immediately compared with lists of known objects to determine its possible nature.