2012-03-20

NASA-Sloan Atlas

Blanton has made the beautiful and useful NASA-Sloan Atlas of galaxies. This is very relevant to my plan for making a human-viewable atlas of the very largest (angularly) galaxies on the sky. Because Blanton was not concerned with precise measurements of the absolutely hugest galaxies, I think we will probably have to use Mykytyn's re-measurements made with the Tractor, but the NASA-Sloan Atlas gives me something pretty good to work with while Mykytyn gets a robust pipeline working. I wrote code today to read, manipulate, and plot the tabular data in Blanton's atlas.

1 comment:

  1. Though I'll note that it does perform for NGC and the smaller Messier objects just fine, and much better than the SDSS pipeline (not because of any particular genius but just because the pipeline is better tuned for such galaxies). But, yes, for M101, M81, M82 and similarly sized galaxies it isn't good enough. M33 is a particularly horrifying case, but I actually think it is impossible to get that right from the existing SDSS imaging (at least for the i & z bands).

    ReplyDelete