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Description
The AAVSO Photometric All Sky Survey (APASS) project is designed to bridge the gap between the shallow Tycho2 two-bandpass photometric catalog that is complete to V=11 and the deeper, but less spatially-complete catalogs like SDSS or PanSTARRS. It can be used for calibration of a specific field; for obtaining spectral information about single sources, determining reddening in a small area of the sky; or even obtaining current-epoch astrometry for rapidly moving objects. The survey is being performed at two locations: near Weed, New Mexico in the Northern Hemisphere; and at CTIO in the Southern Hemisphere. Each site consists of dual bore-sighted 20cm telescopes on a single mount, designed to obtain two bandpasses of information simultaneously. Each telescope covers 9 square degrees of sky with 2.5arcsec pixels, with the main survey taken with B,V,g',r',i' filters and covering the magnitude range 10<V<17. A bright extension is underway, saturating at V=7 and extending the wavelength coverage from u' to Y. The current catalog is Data Release 9 and contains approximately 62 million stars. The American Association of Variable Star Observers is responsible for the overall management of the survey; a team of professional astronomers participate in the data analysis. The project was initially funded by the Robert Martin Ayers Sciences Fund, with a follow-on grant from the National Science Foundation.
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