Caltech Contact: George Djorgovski
Email: george at astro.caltech.edu

Palomar-Quest (PQ) is an ongoing synoptic (repeating) digital sky survey, conducted at the 48-inch Samuel Oschin telescope at Palomar Observatory, using a novel and unprecedented 161-Megapixel, 112-CCD camera custom built for this purpose. This survey will be the principal event producing factory for a rapid-response telescope grid, and is also being used to find very distant quasars. PQ is a collaboration of Caltech, JPL, Yale, and several other groups. It is the first major digital sky survey designed and conducted in the Virtual Observatory era, with the VO standards and compliance built in from the start. It is also a scientific and technological precursor and testbed for the more ambitious synoptic sky surveys envisioned for the future, e.g., Pan-STARRS or LSST. PQ produces up to 70 GB of image data per clear night, and 13 TB are already in hand. The data are taken in two modes: continuous drift scanning with 4 filters, or multiple, repeated snapshot images in a single broad-band filter. The power of the PQ survey as a tool in exploring the optically faint, variable sky is the so far unprecedented combination of depth, area coverage, and a number of epochs.