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| Paper: |
Searching for Deeper Blank Fields in the Sky with TESELA |
| Volume: |
475, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XXII |
| Page: |
29 |
| Authors: |
Cardiel, N.; Jiménez-Esteban, F. M.; Cabrera-Lavers, A.; Alacid, J. M. |
| Abstract: |
TESELA is a Virtual Observatory tool which provides a simple interface that allows the user to retrieve a list of Blank Fields —regions devoid of bright stars down to a given threshold magnitude— available near a given position in the sky. The initial version of this tool, already presented in ADASS 2011, made use of the Delaunay triangulation to determine a tessellation of the whole celestial sphere using the astrometric and photometric information for the 2.5 million brightest stars provided by the Tycho-2 stellar catalogue. More recently we have used the Delaunay Triangulation to search for deeper blank fields, with a minimum diameter of 10 arcmin and an increasing threshold
magnitude ranging from 15 to 18 in USNO-B R-band. However, instead of tessellating the whole sky at once, and considering the exponentially growing number of stars when moving to fainter stellar magnitudes, we started the searching procedure by exploring in the subsample of the initial Blank Field list derived from the Tycho-2 stellar catalogue containing Blank Fields with size larger than 10 arcmin. Some of these new Deep Blank Fields were tested with the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias and have been included in the nightly operation, demonstrating to be extremely useful for medium and large size telescopes. The new catalogue is also available through the TESELA interface which, in addition, provides galactic extinction information from the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive. |
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