Listing of Poster Abstracts

The Ultraviolet Sky: the Legacy of the GALEX Surveys

Luciana Bianchi (Johns Hopkins Univ., Dept. of Physics and Astronomy)

More than 200 million UV sources have been measured so far by GALEX, the first mission to provide imaging sky surveys in two UV bands: far-UV (1344-1786A) and near-UV (1771-2831A). Surveys were performed with varying depth and coverage of the sky. What are the UV sources? How many are Milky Way stars, and how many are extragalactic objects? How are they distributed in color, magnitude, and luminosity? Which classes of objects are best selected from UV surveys, matched to multi-wavelength databases? Are there peculiar types of objects discovered from the GALEX data? We describe and characterize the major legacy catalogs from the GALEX database, and catalogs of UV sources matched with data at other wavelengths. We present sample science applications. The UV surveys, linked to a multi-wavelength archive, offer great sensitivity to detect and characterize several classes of astrophysical objects, including low-redshift QSOs, hot white dwarfs, and star-forming galaxies.

The LSST Deep Drilling Fields

William Brandt (Penn State Astronomy and Astrophysics)

In addition to executing the main survey, the LSST observing program will include a number of Deep Drilling Fields. These will utilize up to about 10% of the LSST time and will provide deeper data with more frequent time sampling. Science goals for these Deep Drilling Fields are broad and are still being developed. They include AGN studies, faint-galaxy clustering, photometric redshift estimation, strong and weak lensing, supernovae, galaxies, stellar populations, and Solar System objects. I will briefly review the current status and expected future planning work for the LSST Deep Drilling Fields.

Challenges for Very Wide Field Spectroscopy

Matthew Colless (Australian Astronomical Observatory)

In an era when deep all-sky imaging surveys are available at most wavelengths, one of the critical challenges will be equally comprehensive all-sky spectroscopic follow-up. I will discuss the generic issues driving very wide field spectroscopic surveys, and some of the specialised facilities and new technologies that will be required to address this challenge. I will review the AAO's specific instrumental and observational plans for large-scale spectroscopic surveys aimed at a variety of scientific goals including Galactic archeology, the dark matter distribution in the local universe, and the spatially-resolved evolution of galaxies out to high redshifts.

Mapping the Milky Way’s Ultracool Dwarfs, Subdwarfs, and White Dwarfs with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Saurav Dhital (Vanderbilt University)

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be a valuable resource for low-mass (MLTY and white dwarf) stellar science, characterizing the photometric and kinematic properties of a large, homogeneous sample of low-mass dwarfs in the extended solar neighborhood. LSST will survey the 30,000 sq. deg. of the Southern sky in six bands (ugrizy) to a single exposure depth of r=24.5 and to a co-added depth of r=28. LSST's temporal coverage will include ~1000 visits over ten years for a typical location in the survey footprint, enabling proper motion and parallax measurements for a remarkable number of objects.  The Deep Drilling Fields offer even more opportunity by going deeper and/or providing a higher cadence. Here, we describe three basic low-mass science questions that LSST will be able to study. (1) With its depth LSST will identify and characterize unprecedented numbers of low-mass disk dwarfs, halo subdwarfs, and white dwarfs, enabling the construction of a complete spatial, kinematic, and chemical map of the local Milky Way based on empirical data. (2) With its temporal coverage, LSST will be able to study rotation periods and/or other periodic behavior(s) of field and cluster MLT dwarfs, as well as cloud properties in T dwarfs. (3) LSST will identify many low-mass eclipsing binary systems, including more than 20 brown dwarf-brown dwarf systems, providing important constraints for stellar formation and evolutionary models.

Star-Galaxy Separation in Deep Surveys

Ross Fadely (Haverford College)

Current and upcoming optical surveys will provide an unprecedented view of the sky by observing down to faint limiting magnitudes of r ~ 24 and beyond. Such surveys, like LSST, have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the Milky Way and distant galaxies, but require efficient and accurate source identification to do so. Morphologically based methods of stellar classification fail at r > 23, due to the overwhelming numbers of faint, point-like galaxies. We present a fully hierarchical Bayesian approach, which uses all available photometric and morphological information. As a demonstration, we apply our approach to ugriz data from the COSMOS survey, which has robust source classification from HST and ground-based photometry across 30 bands. We find our approach does significantly better than maximum likelihood techniques, and present results from current and ongoing work.

The Indra Simulation Database

Bridget Falck (Johns Hopkins University)

We present the Indra suite of cosmological N-body simulations and the design of its companion database. Indra consists of 512 different instances of a 1 Gpc/h-sided box, each with 512^3 dark matter particles and the same input cosmology, enabling an unprecedented handle on cosmic variance and a characterization of very large-scale modes of the matter power spectrum. Each simulation outputs 64 snapshots, giving over 100TB of data for the full set of simulations, all of which will be loaded into a SQL database. We discuss the database design for the particle data, consisting of the positions and velocities of each particle, and halos, with links to the particle data so that halo properties can be calculated within the database. Example queries will be given, including the use of SqlArrays, and the ongoing database development will be discussed.

Quasars at z~6 and Above: Prospects for Wide-and-Deep X-ray Surveys and Results From Current Exploratory Programs.

Roberto Gilli (INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna)

The formation and growth of supermassive black holes in the early Universe is the subject of intense theoretical speculation. Quasars at z>6 are rare objects, which are generally found by means of relatively shallow wide-area optical surveys. By selection, these objects represent only the most luminous and unobscured part of the high-z AGN population, and thus provide limited constraints to theoretical models. X-ray surveys, which could ideally detect weak and obscured objects, are still poorly effective in finding AGN at z~6, either because they sample too small volumes, or because they are too shallow. We will discuss the prospects of measuring and characterize the population of z>6 AGN by means of wide-and-deep X-ray surveys such as those proposed with the Wide Field X-ray Telescope mission. We will also report about an on-going MMT/VLT spectroscopic program to identify quasars candidates at z~6. These candidates have been selected as X-ray sources with red i-z color over the 130-deg2 area covered by both the SDSS and the Chandra archive. Results and problematics of this and similar programs will be discussed.

LSQ Variability Survey and First Transient Candidates

Ellie Hadjiyska (Yale University)

We describe the La Silla-QUEST (LSQ) Variability Survey as the Southern counterpart to the Palomar-QUEST Survey, responsible for the detection of several hundred nearby supernovae for the Berkeley Supernova Factory, studies of quasar and blazar variability, and the discovery of dwarf planets in the outer solar system. The survey utilizes the 1.0-m Schmidt Telescope of the European Southern Observatory at La Silla, Chile with the large area QUEST camera previously installed on the 1.2-m Oschin Schmidt at Palomar. The LSQ Survey is now regularly surveying ~1000 square deg per night with a repeat cadence of hours to days. The data are currently processed on a daily basis though the Yale photometry pipeline and candidate transient events are regularly scanned and considered for follow up. We present here a brief overview of the photometric capabilities of LSQ, as well as a look at the first variable candidates produced by the subtraction program.

Extremely Red Objects in ALHAMBRA Survey

Cesar Husillos (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC))

ALHAMBRA is a survey based in a new photometric system composed by 20 medium, rectangular no-overlapping filters, covering optical range (3300-9700 Amstrong) plus the standard JHKs NIR filters. The main goal is to study Cosmic Evolution. In this poster we present preliminary results on the detection and characteristics of very extremely red objects (EROs) selected in a 0.25 square degrees subset (coincident with the COSMOS field) of the ALHAMBRA survey. EROs were selected as objects showing r-Ks>3.2 and brighter than Ks=22 in the AB system. The LEPHARE (Arnouts S. & Ilbert O.) and BPZ (Benitez et al., 2000) codes were used for the determination of photometric redshifts. We obtained more than 2000 EROs candidates with reliable photo-z and spectral energy distribution (SED) in this subset. We have checked the accuracy of the photometric redshifts by comparing them with high quality (cc of 3.5 and higher) spectroscopic redshifts of the 52 common objects in the zCOSMOS catalogue, obtaining a median absolute deviations of delta_z/(1+z) of 0.0091. We also show how the SED provided by the ALHAMBRA photometric setup may discriminate between early and late type galaxy populations in the EROs sample.

New Baryonic Acoustic Feature and Anisotropic Clustering Results

Eyal Kazin (New York University)

Combining new clustering measurements of WiggleZ, 6dFGS and SDSS galaxies, we find a 4.4-4.8 sigma detection of the baryonic acoustic feature (Blake, Kazin, Beutler and the WiggleZ collaboration, in prep). Measuring real and z-space clustering in the linear and non-linear regimes of the SDSS luminous red galaxies, we measure an index of growth of structure gamma=0.62 pm 0.07, consistent with the LCDM value of 0.55 (Kazin & Tinker, in prep). Finally, introducing ``clustering wedges" xi(s,Delta mu) where mu=s||/s, we improve techniques of measuring the expansion rate H(z) and angular diameter distance Da(z) using galaxy clustering anisotropies (Kazin, Sanchez & Blanton).

Obstacles and Advantages in Cross-Matching (Multi-Wavelength) Sky Surveys

Amy Kimball (National Radio Astronomy Observatory)

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) catalog will be faint enough to identify the optical counterpart for virtually every radio source in state-of-the-art radio surveys. But identifying the correct optical counterparts will be difficult given the high source density expected for the LSST. In this poster, I present calculations that predict the expected reliability and completeness of radio survey and LSST cross-matching as a function of astrometric accuracy and matching radius. Radio sky surveys should reach positional accuracies of better than 0.5 arcsec to identify LSST counterparts with 90% reliability. The Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) will obtain such positional accuracies for sources brighter than 100 microJy (peak flux density, 5 sigma rms).

Surveys of the Galactic HI Sky

Felix Lockman (NRAO)

Surveys of the Galactic HI Sky Felix J. Lockman NRAO Green Bank, WV 24944 USA ABSTRACT As a result of work over the next few years, for the first time we will have access to surveys of the Galactic HI sky in the 21cm line with complete coverage, good sensitivity and adequate angular resolution. These will be quite useful for estimating Galactic foregrounds, and studying the structure and evolution of the Milky Way and its ISM. I will summarize the relevant data sets and discuss their utility and limitations, review the new surveys expected in the coming decade and describe the likely continuing need for additional high-quality 21cm data. Finally, I will consider what might be learned from 21cm HI observations several orders of magnitude more sensitive than those currently contemplated. The sky is largely unexplored in 21cm emission below log(NHI)=18 yet there are signs of gas at this at column density level tracing galactic interactions and infall. Measurements to a detection limit log(NHI)=17 are now possible and may be made in limited regions of the sky.

The UKIDSS View of the Substellar Initial Mass Function

Nicolas Lodieu (IAC, Tenerife)

In this contribution, we present the mass functions in several open clusters and star-forming regions targeted by the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) Galactic Clusters Survey (GCS). We will describe the photometric search using the five infrared filters employed by the GCS as well as the astrometric selection using 2MASS as first epoch. We will compare the mass functions derived in the Pleiades (125 Myr), the IC4665 pre-main-sequence cluster (27 Myr), the Upper Sco association (5 Myr) and sigma Orionis (1-5 Myr).

Reconstructing Redshift Distributions using Cross-correlations of Spectroscopic and Photometric Surveys

Daniel Matthews (University of Pittsburgh)

Many of the cosmological measurements to be performed with future wide-area photometric surveys will require extremely well-characterized photometric redshifts. A conventional approach is to calibrate these photo-z's using large sets of spectroscopic redshifts; however, even for objects 3 magnitudes brighter than future surveys will reach, current surveys on 8-10m telescopes only obtain secure redshifts for 40-70% of the objects with spectra. A powerful alternative approach is to exploit the clustering of galaxies to calibrate photometric redshifts. Measuring the two-point angular cross-correlation between objects in a photometric redshift bin and objects with known spectroscopic redshift, as a function of the spectroscopic z, allows the true redshift distribution of a photometric sample to be reconstructed in detail, even if it includes objects too faint for spectroscopy or if spectroscopic samples are highly incomplete. In this presentation, I will describe new tests of this method using mock galaxy surveys constructed from the Millennium Simulation semi-analytic galaxy catalogs, allowing us both to verify the technique and optimize methods. A key finding is that errors are dominated by sample/cosmic variance and hence are largely determined by the area covered by spectroscopy; a dense spectroscopic survey covering a few square degrees would not be sufficient for calibrating LSST photometric redshifts, but a wide area survey with ~100k objects within a 500-1000 square degree overlap region would suffice. Combining photometric and wide-area spectroscopic surveys in the same region of sky will be a powerful tool for future cosmological experiments.

Selection, characterization and photometric redshift determination for QSOs in the ALHAMBRA survey.

Israel Matute  (Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (IAA-CSIC))

Photometric redshift (photo-Z) determination for galaxies has been drastically improved over the last decade (with errors and outliers of only a few percent) becoming a perfect complement to spectroscopic z adn a valueble tool for any present of future survey. The same level of accuracy of galaxies has also been reached nowdays for the AGN population thanks to the improvement of the templates libraries and a better treatment of their intrinsic luminosity variability. We characterize the efficiency of the ALHAMBRA optical-NIR photometric survey to derive highly accurate photometric redshift for AGN. In particular we will present the accuracy results for the most luminous of these sources (the QSOs) over an area of ~2.5 sq. degrees. This determination is based on all the available spectroscopic information in the ALHAMBRA fields from other major cosmological surveys (e.g. COSMOS, GOODS, SDSS, DEEP and SWIRE). With the appropriate methodology (i.e. proper selection of templates, priors and extinction laws) we find that a well designed photometric survey like ALHAMBRA can provide photometric redshift estimates with accuracies equal or better than any previous result. The same methodology is currently been applied to the entire ALHAMBRA database in order to obtain not only a complete, flux limited, sample of QSOs selected purely on ALHAMBRA photometry but also to the search of more exotic candidates like red QSOS, BALQSOs or very high-z objects.

The Next Generation CFHT: A 10m-Class, Wide-field, Spectroscopic Facility for the Coming Decade

Alan McConnachie (NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics)

The 3.6m Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT) is one of the world's most versatile astronomical research facilities. Here, we detail progress of an ongoing Concept Study to upgrade the CFHT to a 10m-class facility with a {it dedicated} wide-field (1.5 sq.degree), highly multi-plexed (N>3000) spectrograph with low (R=1500), medium (R=5000) and high (R=20000) resolutions. This "next generation" CFHT, which will ideally see first light in the early 2020s, will be an incredibly powerful research tool serving an extremely broad user-base. It will uniquely be able to address some of the key science questions in astronomy, such as the equation of state of the Universe and the reconstruction of the formation history of the Milky Way. Crucially, it will be the sole 10m facility capable of providing dedicated wide-field spectroscopic follow-up observations for facilities like HSC, LSST and WFIRST.

JPAS and PAU-Brazil South Surveys - An Optical All-Sky Survey in 56 Narrow Band Filters

Claudia Mendes de Oliveira (University of Sao Paulo)

JPAS (Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey) is a Spanish-Brazilian collaboration to conduct an innovative photometric survey of the northern sky using a system of 56 filters (which is equivalent to taking low-resolution spectra with R=60) and the PAU-Brazil South survey is an initiative to replicate the JPAS survey to the southern hemisphere. This poster will describe the main characteristics of both surveys.

An All Sky HI Survey with the Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder

Gerhardt Meurer (The University of Western Australia (ICRAR))

I will discuss the status of WALLABY - the "Widefield ASKAP L-band Legacy All-sky Blind survey" which will survey 3/4 of the sky for 21cm HI emission. Particular emphasis will be placed on the science we expect to obtain on the nearest galaxies where the HI emission will be resolved by ASKAP's 30" synthesized beam.

The PAU@WHT Survey

Ramon Miquel (IFAE Barcelona)

The PAU team is building a new camera, PAUCam, to be installed at the prime focus of the WHT in La Palma. The instrument covers the entire 1-degree FoV of the 4-meter telescope with 18 2k x 4k Hamamatsu CCDs, with a 0.26”/15μm plate scale. The camera will use 36 narrow-band filters and the 6 standard ugrizY wide-band filters, taking advantage of the excellent sensitivity of the CCDs across the entire wavelength range from 0.3 to 1 μm. As a survey camera, PAUCam can cover 2 sq. deg. per night in all filters, delivering low-resolution (R~50) spectra for 30000 galaxies, 5000 stars, 1000 quasars, and 10 clusters per night, with very precise redshifts (σ~0.0035x(1+z)) for galaxies with i_AB < 22.5, and typical photo-z precision (σ~0.035x(1+z)) for galaxies with 22.5

Calibrating Photometric Redshifts with Tidally-Interacting Pairs

Seyed Alireza Mortazavi Karvani (Johns Hopkins University)

LSST will image the sky to unprecedented area and optical depths of ~27-28 magnitudes. However, the lack of a spectroscopic component requires tools for understanding of the accuracy and precision of the measured photometric redshifts with imaging data alone. In this work, we explore the use of tidally-interacting galaxy pairs at z< 1 to constrain photometric redshifts with CFHT Legacy Survey imaging and DEEP2 spectroscopy. Because interacting galaxies must lie at the same redshift, these pairs give us a measure of the photo-z precision at 0 < z < 1 in LSST-depth imaging.

All-Sky Diffuse UV Emission From GALEX Observations

Jayant Murthy (Indian Institute of Astrophysics)

We present all-sky maps of the diffuse emission from the GALEX spacecraft. These include observations over 75% of the sky with both large and small scale features. The diffuse emission in the UV is largely due to the scattering of starlight from interstellar dust and therefore generally follows a cosecant law distribution from the Galactic plane with a good correlation with the IR emission. There are significant deviations from this at higher spatial resolutions with an empirical scatter much greater than would have been expected from instrumental noise. We also note dust scattering halos around several bright stars indicative of dust scattering from thin clouds in front of those stars. Emission from interstellar dust, and diffuse emission in general, can be the most important limitation to wide-field observations in many spectral bands and UV observations are an essential tool in understanding the distribution of dust.

Combining Wide-Field Imaging and Spectroscopic Surveys: New Science from Synergies

Jeffrey Newman (University of Pittsburgh)

In the next decade, new instruments and telescopes capable of obtaining both photometric and spectroscopic data over extremely wide fields will become available. Although these surveys will have great science yield on their own, combining deep, large-area, time-domain imaging with wide-field spectrographs will enable new science that neither could do on their own. In this talk, I highlight two examples of these synergies. First, followup of LSST supernova hosts with the BigBOSS instrument (or a comparable spectrograph) to obtain redshifts would enable reconstruction of the peculiar velocity field on large scales, providing substantial constraints on dark energy models and a test of general relativity. This would require roughly 50 nights on a 4m telescope. Second, by measuring the cross-correlation between objects in a photometric sample with galaxies with known spectroscopic redshifts, we can accurately determine the redshift distribution of the photometric sample. Unlike conventional photometric calibration techniques, this does not require the spectroscopic sample to extend as faint as the photometric objects or to be statistically complete, making it well suited for near-future wide-field spectroscopic surveys. A few hundred square degrees of overlap between LSST and BigBOSS coverage would be sufficient to calibrate LSST photometric redshifts to z~3.

The Dual Faces of the LMC from Wide Field Surveys

Knut Olsen (NOAO)

We will discuss the seemingly contradictory results obtained from two recent wide field surveys of the LMC and its periphery. The Outer Limits Survey imaged 18 sq. degrees out to almost 20 degrees radius from the LMC down to depths below that of the oldest main sequence stars at the LMC distance. From photometry of these images, we found that the LMC's exponential disk extends unperturbed out to at least 16 degree radius northwards from the LMC center, with no evidence for dramatic disturbances from interactions with the Milky Way or SMC. In a separate spectroscopic survey of ~6000 stars inside 4 degree radius from the LMC center, we discovered a population of stars, comprising ~5% of the total sample, with kinematics that imply rotation in a plane highly inclined to the LMC disk or counter-rotation in the plane of the LMC disk. The association of the population with HI tidal arms connecting the LMC to the SMC and its low metallicity implies that the stars were accreted by the LMC from the SMC. We suggest that we can reconcile the presence of an orderly LMC disk out to large radius with that of significant disturbances in its interior by appealing to the first infall scenario of the Magellanic Clouds by Besla et al. (2011).

Variable and Transient Sources with the Wide Field X-ray Telescope

Maurizio Paolillo (University of Napoli)

The Wide Field X-ray Telescope (WFXT) is a proposed mission with a high survey speed, due to the combination of large eld of view (FOV) and large eective area, i.e., grasp, and sharp PSF across the whole FOV. These characteristics make it suitable to detect a large number of variable and transient X-ray sources during it operating lifetime, allowing to constrain the rates and properties of distant, faint and rare populations such as X-ray Flashes/faint GRBs, Tidal Disruption Events, ULXs, Type-I bursts etc.

Auto Astronomy

Roshan Pathak (Little Flowers English School)

no any abstract

Galaxy Evolution with LSST

Andrew Ptak (NASA/GSFC)

LSST will be a unique tool to study the universe of galaxies. The database will provide photometry for 10^10 galaxies, from the Local Group to thousands of z>6 galaxies. It will provide structural measurements and 6-band photometry for about 10^9 galaxies, largely at z<1.5. The key goal of the LSST Galaxies Collaboration is to measure the multivariate properties of the galaxy population including trends with redshift and environment. This includes observed galaxy properties (luminosities, colors, sizes, and morphologies) as well as derived galaxy properties (stellar masses, ages, and star formation rates) and how the joint distribution of these galaxy properties depends on redshift and environment as measured on a wide range of scales. Galaxy formation is inherently stochastic, but is fundamentally governed by the statistical properties of the underlying dark-matter density field. Determining how the evolving multivariate galaxy properties and scaling relations depend on this density field, and on the distribution and evolution of dark matter halos, will connect the results of large surveys to theoretical models of structure formation and galaxy formation.

BigBOSS - Mapping the Universe

Natalie Roe (LBNL)

BigBOSS is a wide-field spectroscopic survey to be conducted using 500 nights on the Mayall telescope. BigBOSS will map the large scale structure of the universe using ~20 million galaxies as well as Ly-alpha absorption along the sightlines to 1.5 million quasars. The survey strategy, optical corrector, fiber actuators, spectrograph design and detectors will be described.

The SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey

Richard Scalzo (Australian National University)

The SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey is a five-year wide-field imaging survey of the southern hemisphere, using the newly constructed SkyMapper 1.3-m telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Coonabarabran, NSW. The survey will cover 20,000 deg^2 with six visits in each of six filters, SDSS ugriz and a medium-band Stromgren-like v filter, reaching a final depth of g ~ 23. Approximately one-third of the survey time will be devoted to a rolling search for supernovae and transient sources, particularly type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). Science goals for the survey include improvements to the SN Ia Hubble diagram and constraints on the dark energy equation of state, measurement of peculiar velocity fields in the local Universe using SNe Ia, and searches for extremely metal-poor stars, RR Lyrae variables in the Galaxy's outer halo, and high-redshift quasars. I will give a brief overview of the survey and an update on the current status of commissioning and operations, with emphasis on the search for transient sources.

Gravitational-Wave Detectors as Survey Instruments

Jeremy Schnittman (NASA/GSFC)

In the coming decade, the ground-based interferometers LIGO and Virgo will in all likelihood achieve the first direct detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from compact objects like binary neutron stars, black holes, core-collapse supernovae, and millisecond pulsars. In the following decade, a space-based mission such as LISA would extend our capabilities to lower frequencies appropriate for detecting GWs from galactic white dwarf binaries and supermassive black holes out to cosmological distances. Unlike even the widest-field electromagnetic (EM) instruments, GW detectors provide a 4-pi field-of-view, 24 hours a day, making them ideal for catching transients. By combining GW waveform information with simultaneous or follow-up EM observations, we will be able to vastly improve our understanding of the high-energy transient universe.

All-sky Gravitational Wave Surveys

Peter Shawhan (University of Maryland)

Gravitational-wave detectors such as LIGO and Virgo monitor the entire sky for gravitational waves, and are capable of detecting several types of likely transient and continuous signals. Gravitational waves carry energy directly from the central engines of events such as compact binary mergers and core-collapse supernovae, and thus are complementary to electromagnetic observations of the same events, opening up exciting possibilities for triggered observations and data mining from wide-field surveys. I will describe these capabilities and discuss how they may be exploited, in particular when the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors begin operating with greater sensitivity around 2015.

Digital Access to a Sky Century@Harvard (DASCH): Explore Variables Over 100 Years

Sumin Tang (Harvard Univ.)

DASCH is a project to digitize and analyze the scientific data contained in the ~530,000 Harvard College Observatory (HCO) plates taken between the 1880s and 1990s, which is a unique resource for studying temporal variations in the universe on ~10-100 yr timescales. We have developed the astrometry and photometry pipeline, scanned ~13,000 plates in several selected fields. Here we describe our variable search algorithms and present a few examples of variables we discovered, including a group of new type of variable K giants with 10-100 year dips, a group of Be variables showing ~1 mag variations over years, a new symbiotic nova, and a 5-yr dust accretion event in KU Cyg around 1900.

Predictions for Wide-field NIR Grism Surveys Using the WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallel (WISP) Survey

Harry Teplitz (IPAC)

The WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallel (WISP) Survey is obtaining slitless, near-infrared grism spectroscopy of more than a hundred independent, high-latitude fields by observing in the pure-parallel mode. The program includes about 500 orbits of parallel data. All fields are observed with G141, and about half with G102 as well. Typical 5 sigma detection limits for emission lines of f ~ 5 × 10^-17 erg/s/cm^2 for compact objects. We use the distribution of flux and redshift for WISPs detections to predict the results expected for a shallower, very wide-field survey.

Gaia: Mapping the Milky Way

Nicholas Walton (Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge)

Gaia is an ESA cornerstone mission set to revolutionise our understanding of the Milky Way. Gaia is scheduled for launch in May 2013, and is designed to map over one billion stars with three instruments to collect astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data on stars in the Milky Way and in galaxies belonging to the Local Group, distant galaxies, quasars and solar system objects. Gaia builds on the expertise established in Europe through the successful ESA Hipparcos mission. This poster will provide updated information on the Gaia mission and note the science performance capability of the mission (based on numbers recently confirmed with the recent successful completion of the Gaia mission critical design review). Further, the poster will point to the GREAT (Gaia Research for European Astronomy Training) research network which is taking a role in promoting scientific networking of the community building awareness and readiness in advance of the Gaia launch.

Stellar Science Highlights from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Andrew West (Boston Univerity)

I will present a brief overview of the wealth of stellar science that has (and continues to) come from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). With deep, all-sky, photometric and spectroscopic components, as well as time-domain information (in both the photometry and spectroscopy), the SDSS serves as an important testbed for a number of future wide-field surveys. The SDSS stellar highlights include (but are not limited to) the discovery of stellar streams in the outskirts of the Galaxy, the characterization of thousands of coeval binaries, the best measurement of the stellar IMF to date, and detailed measurements of the kinematics and distributions of stars in the local Milky Way.