5 March 2009

Speaker: Andy Lawrence (University of Edinburgh)

Title:The UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey : The Universe from Parsecs to Gigaparsecs

Abstract:UKIDSS is a suite of IR surveys, two orders of magnitude deeper than 2MASS, being carried out using the UKIRT Wide Field Camera, starting in 2005 and expected to complete around 2011. Three wide area surveys cover the Galactic Plane and the high latitude sky to K=18.5, totalling seven thousand square degrees, with smaller deeper surveys reaching to K=23. These surveys are making an impact on studies of high-z quasars, very cool brown dwarfs, galaxy clustering, high redshift galaxy formation, and many other areas. Data are immediately public to European astronomers and world-public eighteen months later. Data are made available through a queryable database system similar to that used by SDSS, but are also now available through VO tools in conjunction with many other resources. I will summarise the status of UKIDSS, show some science highlights, and give a live demo of data access and VO tools.

Video of the Presentation (Talks can be viewed with RealPlayer. Free download is available from www.real.com )