The First Byurakan Survey (FBS) is the largest and the first systematic objective prism survey of the extragalactic sky. It covers 17,000 sq.deg. in the Northern sky together with a high galactic latitudes region in the Southern sky. The FBS has been carried out by B.E. Markarian, V.A. Lipovetski and J.A. Stepanian in 1965-1980 with the Byurakan Observatory 102/132/213 cm (40"/52"/84") Schmidt telescope using 1.5 deg. prism. Each FBS plate contains low-dispersion spectra of some 15,000-20,000 objects; the whole survey consists of about 20,000,000 objects.
Within this use case for high school students and adanced amateurs
you measure the linear distance of the Andromeda Galaxy following the
steps of the astronomers who first measured it, climbing an important
step of the so-called cosmic distance ladder. The use case requires
the identification of variable stars of the Cepheid class and the
determination of the relation between their period and their intrinsic
luminosity.
Within this use case you learn about supernovae, exploding or
exploded stars. In particular you will use information on the Crab
Nebula (the 1054 aD supernova registered by Chinese astronomers) to
derive its distance: an example of how some very important information
may be gained from very simple arguments and geometry.
VO-compliant publication of Schmidt survey ESO-R of the southern sky digitized with the MAMA microdensitometer at the Observatoire de Paris Image Analysis Centre (CAI).
*** EUV-SYN *** Synchronous synoptic maps of the corona in the
extreme-UV (EUV), built from series of SoHO/EIT observations, in each
of the 4 wavelength bands of the instrument.
Synchronous synoptic maps are maps of the EUV radiance in different
wavelength bands on the full solar sphere, in heliographic
(Carrington) longitude and latitude, where data are taken as close as
possible to a reference time. They capture the state of the corona at
any given reference time by including data taken as close as possible
to this time.
EUV-SYN is available as part of the generic MEDOC interface which is
currently located at https://idoc-medoc.ias.u-psud.fr/. These
interfaces are based on the CNES SiTools2 framework. EUV-SYN is also
available from IDL and Python scripts, using a specialization of the
generic SiTools2 IDL and Python clients developed by MEDOC.