SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey

Approximately 75% of SkyMapper's observing time will be initially dedicated to the Southern Sky Survey, a comprehensive digital survey of the entire southern sky.

Features of the Southern Sky Survey include:

Multi-colour, multi-epoch of all 20000 sq. degrees south of equator (ugriz filters & v filter like the DDO 38 filter)
Data supplied to the community via All-Sky Virtual Observatory
Star and Galaxy photometry (3% absolute calibration)
Astrometry (better than 50 mas )
Digital images available for download, photometrically calibrated, with accurate World Coordinate Systems, both single images and combined images.

The table below summarises the expected survey depth (2.5" seeing) for a signal-to-noise ratio of 5 in AB mags:

	u	v	g	r	i	z
1 EPOCH	19.5	19.5	21.0	21.0	20.0	19.0
SATURATION	10.0	10.5	13.0	13.0	11.0	10.5
EXP. TIME (s)	100	100	100	100	100	100
FINAL DEPTH	20.5	20.5	21.7	21.7	20.7	19.7

In addition, a 5-Second Survey will be undertaken in photometric conditions for calibration of stars from 9th to 16th magnitude in all bands. This will provide the calibration of the survey and will allow the survey to be tied to the Hipparchos and Tycho catalogs (and other photometric standard systems that are established in the southern hemisphere) to ensure uniformity across the sky.

Southern Sky Survey science goals include:

Census of bright end of TNO and Centaur population, especially off the ecliptic plane
Galactic census – metallicity, gravity, temperature, variability of many millions of stars
Mapping the structure of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds
Searching for new dwarf galaxy companions to the Milky Way
Discovery of up to 500 SNe over 5 years
Phot-Z samples of z<0.5 galaxies for studies of Large Scale Structure (e.g. Int-Sachs wolf, Paczynski-Alcock)
QSO discovery, variability, evolution
Bright z>6 Quasars
Digital reference for radio, X-Ray, GRB instruments
An astrometric and photometric basis for the Virtual Observatory

Non-survey science identified to be undertaken with the telescope includes: