Image Service:
Planck 030 GHz Survey

Description

Planck is ESA's third generation space based cosmic microwave background experiment, operating at nine frequencies between 30 and 857 GHz and was launched May 2009. Planck provides all-sky survey data at all nine frequencies with higher resolution at the 6 higher frequencies. It provides substantially higher resolution and sensitivity than WMAP. Planck orbits in the L2 Lagrange point. These data come from Release 1 of the Planck mission. <p> The original data are stored in HEALPix pixels. SkyView treats HEALPix as a standard projection but assumes that the HEALPix data is in a projection plane with a rotation of -45 degrees. The rotation transforms the HEALPix pixels from diamonds to squares so that the boundaries of the pixels are treated properly. The special HealPixImage class is used so that SkyView can use the HEALPix FITS files directly. The HealPixImage simulates a rectangular image but translates the pixels from that image to the nested HEALPix structure that is used by the HEALPix data. Users of the SkyView Jar will be able to access this survey through the web but performance may be poor since the FITS files are 150 to 600 MB in size and must be completely read in. SkyView will not automatically cache these files on the user machine as is done for non-HEALPix surveys. </p> Data from the frequencies of 100 GHz or higher are stored in a HEALPix file with a resolution of approximately 1.7' while lower frequencies are stored with half that resolution, approximately 3.4'.