Southern
Proper Motion Program (SPM)
Dana I. Casetti -Yale Astronomy
The SPM is a collaborative project between Yale Southern Observatory and the Universidad National de San Juan, Argentina. Absolute proper motions are determined for stars in the magnitude range 5 < V < 19. The data are taken with the 50-cm double astrograph at Cesco Observatory. First epoch is entirely photographic. Observations are underway to cover all 1-st epoch area with CCD images. The most recent catalog is SPM4 (~100 Million objects). Absolute proper motions have been determined for the Magellanic Clouds, the core of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy and 37 globular clusters. The aitoff map above shows observations as of March 2013. The bottom-left figure is a diagnostic plot of one night's CCD observations. The bottom-right figure shows a scanned portion of an SPM photographic plate. A poster of the SPM project summary can be found here. We acknowledge NSF (0098687, 0407292, 0407293, 0908996, 1044811), and Yale support. |
Of note Links |
