Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey
The Javalambre-Photometric Local Universe Survey, J-PLUS, is defined to observe 8500 deg2 of the sky visible from Javalambre with the panoramic camera T80Cam at the JAST80 telescope, using a set of 12 broad, intermediate and narrow band optical filters. The Project is particularly designed to carry out the photometric calibration of J-PAS. For this reason, some J-PLUS filters are located at key stellar spectral features that allow to retrieve very accurate spectral energy distributions for more than 5 millions of stars in our Galaxy.
Beyond the calibration goals, the unusually large FOV of T80Cam, 2deg2, together with the unique width and location of some filters, turn the J-PLUS Project into a powerful 3D view of the nearby Universe, mapping more than 20 millions of galaxies with reliable distance determinations and a similar number of stars of the Milky Way halo. At a rate of 100 gigabytes of data per night, J-PLUS will provide unprecedented multi-color images of the Universe to address a wide variety of astrophysical questions related with cosmology, large scale structure, galaxy clusters, 2D stellar populations and star formation studies in galaxies, the discovery of high redshift galaxies at specific redshift slices, quasars, supernovae, Milky Way science and structure, and minor bodies in the Solar System. In addition, the repetition of the whole area over time in certain filters will allow to face variability studies in the time domain.
The preparation and scientific exploitation of J-PLUS is leaded by the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón, CEFCA, and is partially funded by the “Programa Nacional de Astronomía y Astrofísica” of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under grant AYA2012–30789. J-PLUS will be made finally public as a legacy project for the whole scientific community.
OAJ Image
The Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre is an astronomical Spanish ICTS particularly devoted to carry out large sky astronomical surveys with two large field of view telescopes, state-of-the-art panoramic instrumentation, and an unprecedented set of optical filters.
JAST80 Telescope Image
The Javalambre Auxiliary Survey Telescope (JAST80) is an 80cm Ritchey Chrétien telescope with a large field of view of 2 deg diameter, particularly defined for carrying out large sky photometric surveys like J-PLUS.
T80Cam mounted at the JAST80 Cassegrain focus
The scientific instrument for the JAST80 telescope and for J-PLUS is T80Cam, a wide-field camera installed at the Cassegrain focus. It is equipped with a 9.2k-by-9.2k, 10μm pixel, high efficiency CCD that is read from 16 ports simultaneously, allowing read times of 12s with a typical read noise of 3.4 electrons (RMS). This full wafer CCD covers a large fraction of the telescope’s field of view (FoV) with a pixel scale of 0.55"/pixel.
Rack with the UPADT80 storage system (100 TB), computing nodes and database nodes
The data archiving and processing of the images collected at the OAJ will be carried out in the Unit for Processing and Data Archiving (UPAD). This data center will provide the hardware infrastructure needed to store, process and analyze the images, as well as keep data backup. It will also have the provide efficient access to the scientific database and sky images for the astronomical community and the general public.