GALAH Successfully Observes Over 175,000 Stars!

Submitted by webmaster on Wed, 2015-07-15 01:32

This is a huge number of targets with high resolution spectroscopy in the Southern sky.

GALAH coverage as of 06/18/2015. Accessible portions of the sky are shown in grey, and GALAH observations are shown in violet and pink. See below for more information. Credit: J. Marshall

As of 30 August 2015, the hard working GALAH team has observed over 177,595 stars! Thanks to HERMES multi-object capabilities, we can acquire approximately 400 targets in a given two degree field; we have observed over 532 fields out of a total of 6583 potential fields.

GALAH Team Member Jonathan Marshall (UNSW) has prepared a time lapse visualisation of GALAH coverage over time:

Portions of the sky accessible by GALAH are shown in grey. Fields observed are filled in, with colors indicating their observing category. The 532 fields observed includes 417 "normal" survey fields (shown in pink), 40 Pilot Survey fields (shown in violet), 26 K2 fields (shown in dark orange), 26 globular cluster fields (shown in violet), 14 open cluster fields (shown in magenta), seven CoRoT fields (shown in orange), and two Super Wasp (shown in yellow). The video also shows the motion of the planets and the location of different constellations.