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The sky is not a painting, it's a movie. Stars pulse, flare, and dim when
least expected. Some even explode as supernova. Exotic objects such as
gamma ray bursters or magnetars can make their presence known when formerly
non-descript objects, perhaps in other galaxies, brighten and fade.
Quasars and other extra-galactic sources can show evidence for prodigious
energy outbursts. Nearer and dearer to us, asteroids and comets streak
across the sky, at times uncomfortably close to the Earth.
SkyMorph enables searches for variable, moving or transient objects. It provides convenient access to optical images and catalogs generated by the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) program These include more than 600,000 CCD images covering a large fraction of the sky. The same region is typically observed several times each night, and is revisited on monthly and yearly timescales. You can elect to search the NEAT catalogs for objects in your selected region and you can generate SkyView images to compare the NEAT data with. For moving objects you may check if an object is visible in NEAT or either the original or second generation Digitized Sky Surveys (DSS and DSS2). Moving object searches use ephemerides generated dynamically using NASA's Horizons project. SkyMorph is a NASA Applied Information Systems Research (AISR) funded project. |
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HEASARC Director:
Dr. Nicholas E. White |
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Responsible NASA Official:
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