The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is an ambitious, multi-institutional project to create a huge digital imaging and spectroscopic data bank of 25% of the celestial sphere, approximately 10,000 deg2 centred on the north galactic polar cap. The photometric atlas will be in 5 specially-chosen colours, covering the π ster of the Survey area to a limiting magnitude of r′∼23.1, on 0′′ . 4 pixels, resultin...

We create realistic, full-sky, half-arcminute resolution simulations of the microwave sky matched to the most recent astrophysical observations. The primary purpose of these simulations is to test the data reduction pipeline for the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) experiment; however, we have widened the frequency coverage beyond the ACT bands and utilized the easily accessible HEALPix map fo...

Spectra of direct and scattered light that passed through a tank of water mixed with up to 25 ml of homogenized skim milk were measured with a spectroradiometer in a classic experiment used to illustrate why the sky is blue and why the Sun turns red near the horizon. The direct light penetrating the tank was reddened by preferential scattering of short waves by the milk particles (protein casei...

We demonstrate how, from the point of view of energy flow through an open system, rain is analogous to many other relaxational processes in nature such as earthquakes. By identifying rain events as the basic entities of the phenomenon, we show that the number density of rain events per year is inversely proportional to the released water column raised to the power of 1.4. This is the rain equiv...

Sky models are quantitative representations of natural luminance of the sky under various atmospheric conditions. They have been used extensively in studies of architectural design for nearly a century, and more recently for rendering objects in the field of computer graphics. The objectives of this paper are to (a) describe sky models, (b) demonstrate how map designers can render terrain under...

The MMT all-sky camera is a low-cost, wide-angle imaging system that takes images of the sky every 10 seconds, day and night. It is based on an Adirondack Video Astronomy StellaCam II video camera and utilizes an auto-iris fisheye lens to allow safe operation under all lighting conditions, even direct sunlight. This combined with the antiblooming characteristics of the StellaCam's detector allo...

Coherent structures in the distribution of the Faraday rotation measure of extragalac-tic radio sources are isolated using wavelet transformation technique. A new algorithm of wavelet analysis for data points nonuniformly distributed on a sphere is developed and implemented. Signatures of the magnetic fields in the local (Orion) spiral arm, the Sagittarius and Carina arms, the synchrotron Loop ...

The ADS All-Sky Survey (ADSASS) is an ongoing effort aimed at turning the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), widely known for its unrivaled value as a literature resource for astronomers, into a data resource. The ADS is not a data repository per se, but it implicitly contains valuable holdings of astronomical data, in the form of images, tables and object references contained within articles...