Pan-STARRS

Pan-STARRS Science Database : Overview

The various surveys planned for Pan-STARRS telescope facility will generate an unprecedented volume of astronomical observations. There is little doubt that the information contained in these data will be of much broader interest to the astronomical community than envisioned in the design plans for any of the individual surveys. Pan-STARRS will open especially exciting opportunities to examine the time-history of the sky and, by combining many exposures over the duration of the surveys, develop the faintest wide-field images heretofore available.

To make available to the astronomical community the plethora of information contained in the images that the system will obtain, the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) and our Pan-STARRS team member Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) are developing the Pan-STARRS Scientific Database (SDB). This database will be the repository of source catalogs derived from the focal-plane images recorded by the Pan-STARRS observing system. (At this time the project does not have the resources necessary to provide for saving every image byte generated in the observing programs.)

1. The Pan-STARRS SDB will provide to the astronomical community
   1. the temporal history of astrometry and photometry for all sources more than 20-sigma above sky detected in at least 3 of the 4 focal plane cameras in any single exposure.
   2. the temporal history of astrometry and photometry for all sources > 5-sigma above the sky detected in the combined focal plane image for any single exposure.
   3. the temporal history for all transient sources > 3-sigma above the background level in the difference images formed from an individual combined focal plane exposure and the "static" sky.
   4. the astrometry, photometry, and source description parameters for all sources > 3-sigma above the sky in the cumulative sky images taken in any filter.
2. The Pan-STARRS SDB will be searchable over
   1. spatial coordinates
   2. time
   3. user defined ranges of the various source attributes
   4. exposure metadata
3. The Pan-STARRS database will contain postage-stamp copies of TBD size for all sources brighter than TBD magnitude. These postage-stamp images will be extracted from the astrometrically and photometrically calibrated focal plane images.

The Pan-STARRS project plans to develop a web site and image server to provide the databases and cumulative sky frames to the general astronomical community, adopting the guidelines for such services as described by the National Virtual Observatory/International Virtual Observatory consortia.