Scott Virtes: Astronomy : PMDO Survey :

PMDO (Poor Meadow Dyke Observatory) is a private sky survey which photographs a strip of the sky from 4d40 to 7d25 north each night, as weather permits. With a limiting magnitude of about 14, and a resolution of 14.1" per pixel, it can detect fainter objects than the Stardial survey. Its home page is sky-survey.com, and it is run by Steve Chambers, who's always a pleasure to talk to. He's managed to set up a system that monitors up to 100,000+ stars on a clear night. Unlike Stardial, with Steve's data, I can query his archive and get detailed photometric measurements of objects. Wow.

Here are some of the things I'm doing with this data:

Project #1: A set of tools for accessing the data archive. There's a lot of stuff in there if you know how to get it. Since I've always had a knack for data visualization, this is a good test. ;-) Here are the first tools of many:

• A graph of the sky coverage for the survey, from its beginning.
• Check the availability of plates without having to send emails.

Project #2: Search for variable stars, both known and new ones.

• Here is my Master List - a list of over 300 known variables that should be visible to this survey. This new list links to dynamic light curves and other goodies, so check it out.
• Variable stars - notes & pictures of known & suspected variables.

Here's a teaser ... this star is not listed in GCVS (as far as I know), but here it is clearly going through a cycle:

Okay, a search turned up NSV 3434 at this location, an old red star mag 13.5-15.., unknown period. Worth keeping an eye on!

And here's a known variable, WX CMi, doing it's thing:

Project #3: After accumulating enough images, it may be possible to build a photographic atlas of this band of the sky. Here are some sample charts! (added Feb 2004)
Charts available: [001-006] - [007-012] - [013-018] - [098-103] - [104-109] - [110-115]

Project #4: Looking for asteroids & comets. While most of the undiscovered asteroids are way too faint (mag 18 to 22) to show up in PMDO images, you never know.

• Asteroids - some images of asteroids spotted on survey plates
• An odd one - an interesting pair of blips, check it out!

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The text contents of this page are Copyright 2003-2004 by Scott Virtes.
The data is generated by the PMDO Survey, Steve Chambers.