{"id":18736,"date":"2017-11-15T01:43:27","date_gmt":"2017-11-14T17:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/super-wide-angle-zwicky-transient-facility-celebrates-first-light-with-help-from-uw\/"},"modified":"2017-11-15T01:43:27","modified_gmt":"2017-11-14T17:43:27","slug":"super-wide-angle-zwicky-transient-facility-celebrates-first-light-with-help-from-uw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/super-wide-angle-zwicky-transient-facility-celebrates-first-light-with-help-from-uw\/","title":{"rendered":"Super-wide-angle Zwicky Transient Facility celebrates \u2018first light\u2019 with help from UW"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"ZTF
The Zwicky Transient Facility captured this \u201cfirst light\u201d image on Nov. 1. The Orion Nebula is at lower right. Computers searching these images for quick-changing events are trained to recognize and ignore non-astronomical artifacts such as the vertical lines seen here. (Caltech Optical Observatories)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A sky survey that draws upon the data-crunching skills of researchers at the University of Washington has reached a milestone known as \u201cfirst light\u201d \u2014 and the view is awesome.<\/p>\n

The Zwicky Transient Facility takes super-wide-angle pictures of the night sky, using a robotic camera hooked up to the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Caltech\u2019s Palomar Observatory in the mountains near San Diego.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst light\u201d occurs when astronomers capture their first image with a new observing instrument. ZTF\u2019s first-light image, taken on Nov. 1, shows a wide swath of the sky that includes the Orion Nebula.<\/p>\n

Each ZTF exposure covers a sky area equal to 247 full moons, or 47 square degrees, resulting in an image that\u2019s bigger than 24,000 by 24,000 pixels at full resolution. The camera can cover the entire northern sky in the course of three nights, and scan the visible plane of the Milky Way twice each night.<\/p>\n

The aim of the ZTF project is to catch transient sky phenomena that appear and fade quickly, ranging from supernovas, to asteroids and comets, to the outbursts associated with neutron star collisions and gravitational-wave emissions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of activity happening in our night skies,\u201d Caltech\u2019s Shri Kulkarni, principal investigator for the ZTF campaign, explained in a news release. \u201cIn fact, every second, somewhere in the universe, there\u2019s a supernova that\u2019s exploding. Of course, we can\u2019t see them all, but with ZTF we will see up to tens of thousands of explosive transients every year over the three-year lifetime of the project.\u201d<\/p>\n

ZTF\u2019s data archive is expected to grow by 4 trillion bytes each night.<\/p>\n