Abstract: We performed a deep wide field optical survey of the young (~ 100 - 150 Myr) open cluster Blanco1 to study its low mass population well down into the brown dwarf regime and estimate its mass function over the whole cluster mass range.The survey covers 2.3 square degrees in the I and z - bands down to I ~ z ~ 24 with the CFH12K camera. (arxiv.org)
But they could tell that the variations they saw matched a map of galaxies made by a previous optical survey, as the team reports in tomorrow's issue of Nature. (sciencemag.org)
NIRSS fills a pivotal gap in our knowledge of the celestial sphere, is a natural complement to WISE, and is well matched to the next generation of deep (0.1 uJy), wide - area (> 2 pi ster), ground - based optical surveys (LSST and Pan-Starrs). (arxiv.org)