[ASA] SkyMapper Early Data Release (EDR) from the Short Survey

Tue May 10 10:30:45 AEST 2016

Dear colleagues,

the SkyMapper Team is pleased to announce that the first data release from its five-year Southern Sky Survey is now available for use by Australian astronomers at http://skymapper.anu.edu.au. The science-grade Early Data Release (EDR) covers a third of the southern sky (6,700 sq. deg) in all six SkyMapper filters (uvgriz) and includes 503 million detections from nearly 20,000 Short Survey images taken between March 2014 and March 2015. These have been merged to a mean photometry catalogue of 49 million unique objects complete to 17.3–17.7 mag, pre-matched against WISE, 2MASS, UCAC4 and APASS DR9.

Catalogue access (through Cone Search and TAP/ADQL) and image cutouts are available at the website and through Virtual Observatory tools like TOPCAT and Aladin (see http://skymapper.anu.edu.au/how-to-access/). Australian astronomers have exclusive access to the EDR for the first 12 months following its release, after which time the data are available to researchers worldwide. Please also note the authorship and publication policy for EDR data, available http://skymapper.anu.edu.au/policies.

More information on the survey and EDR are available at the website. We encourage all Australian astronomers to use the EDR for their research and give the SkyMapper Team feedback on data quality, completeness and suggestions for improving the access tools. Later in 2016 we expect a  new release (DR1) with improved calibration and faint-end data quality, and 2017 should see a major release of deeper Main Survey data. We are planning a workshop soon to gather community feedback and preview DR1.

The SkyMapper Team

Bug warning: there is a known bug in our TAP server implementation that deletes brackets from algebraic and logical expressions before they are passed to the database, e.g the test query SELECT * FROM master_edr WHERE u_psf<10 AND (u_psf>21 OR u_psf IS NOT NULL) does not return rows with u_psf<10 as expected. We appreciate you patience while we fix the problem and welcome any further reports of ADQL inconsistencies.
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