2 Micron All Sky Survey - 2MASS

2MASS the 2 Micron All Sky Survey is an all sky survey in the 2 micron range that used both northern and southern hemisphere 1.3 meter telescopes to cover the whole sky from 1997 through 2001 with a final post processing release in 2003.

According to wikipedia, the goals of 2MASS were to look into the areas of the Milky way hidden in visible light, to look for brown dwarfs and low mass stars and to create a catalog of all of the galaxies and stars 2MASS could detect.

2MASS North Mt. Hopkins and M57 from IPAC image gallery

2MASS South Cerro Tololo CTIO Chili from IPAC image gallery

Click here to see a live webcam pointed at 2MASS south via SKYNET remote network.

• wavelengths J (1.25 um), H (1.65 um), and Ks (2.17 um) in the Near Infrared (NIR)
• over 500 million sources in the point source catalog
• 1.6 million sources in the extended source catalog which were resolved
• catalogs publicly available.

There is a lot more info here at the IPAC 2MASS page

But I have not read through it all and I still don't know why its J, H, K which is not the order of the alphabet and it really bugs me!

2MASS Picture of the Week

Orion - Atlas Image courtesy of 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF

There is a really nice image out there somewhere that shows where 2MASS falls on the spectrum that I will try to find.