Project revealed - theSkyNet POGS and Gridcoin. Get to know the Universe!

Hello, science lovers and steemit fellows! Welcome to my weekly post, featuring whitelisted Gridcoin projects. This week we will point our eyes towards the stars with a project, called theSkyNet POGS. Are you ready to find and get to know new galaxies? Are you ready to share some idle resources of your computer and mobile device? Let's say NO to pointless hashing. Let's encourage science with the help of Gridcoin and BOINC.

First let's look at some images of a galaxy, taken by different means.

TheSkyNet POGS, being a whitelisted Gridcoin project, ultimately uses web connected computers to do some special researches in the fields of astronomy. The project team manages to combine the spectral coverage of the space telescopes GALEX, Pan-STARRS1, and WISE to generate an overall galaxy atlas for the closest Universes. The research team deals with some definite parameters, including star formation rate, stellar mass of the galaxy, dust attenuation, and many more. It uses special pixel-by-pixel algorithm to build up these complex images. And now we all can be a part of this.

An image of the Pan-STARRS1 telescope

The Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, known as PS1 for short is built by the University of Hawaii and currently produces the best widefield optical sky survey images. Compared to its predecessors it is a lot more sensitive and utilizes a higher angular resolution of the Hawaiian sky.
Its primary mirror has a diameter of only 1.8 meters, but what makes the telescope unique is the imaging instrumentation. The gigapixel camera was custom built and it is definitely the world's largest digital camera, and it "hosts" 1.4 billion pixels. The camera has a great deal of segments and each of the them is made of 64 individual CCDs. The entire camera has about 4000 CCDs! Each image taken with this mega-camera is about 2 GB of size. This means, that on a typical night this telescope collects several terabytes of data. Of course this gigapixel camera helps to explore the sky quicker.

The PS1 camera under construction

Constantly, a team of astronomers and scientists decide where to point the camera at, having in mind the atmosphere conditions, cosmic noises and several other factors. Every outgoing image of the telescope combines several pre-images which are using different photo filters.

TheSkyNet POGS has a more difficult task, having to combine different gigapixel images into more detailed one and even distinguish different components, building up the galaxies as stars, gas, even dust and even dark matter.
You may ask yourself where our help comes. Our BOINC clients are designed to estimate the contribution of stellar populations, geometrical arrangement and age of various objects. All of this is done by carefully comparing the multi observations of various telescopes and images in order to build up a model, of course by model predictions algorithm.

You can imagine how much of a data has to be processed in order to get a clear sky model, being only a tiny bit part of the huge galaxies. Do you want to know the near galaxies better! I am already excited. Let's help scientists to explore these pieces of magic.

Bye and see ya! Stay tuned for even more articles about Gridcoin and science!

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*Sources:
http://pogs.theskynet.org/pogs/- The main website of the project, source of information.
https://www.gridcoin.us/ and https://gridcoin.science/ - official Gridcoin websites.
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ - BOINC client instructions and download.
Photos from Google search engine.