So, what is the ADS All Sky Survey?

The ADS All-Sky Survey (ADSASS) is an ongoing effort aimed at turning the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), widely known for its unrivaled value as a literature resource for astronomers, into a data resource. The ADS is not a data repository per se, but it implicitly contains valuable holdings of astronomical data, in the form of images, tables and object references contained within articles. The objective of the ADSASS effort is to extract these data and make them discoverable and available through existing data viewers.

The view of the ADS All Sky Survey you are visiting is a sky heatmap of astronomy articles based on the celestial objects they reference. In other words, this ADSASS viewer visualizes the parts of the sky that have been studied by astronomers. The "hotter" a part of the sky is, the more it has been studied in the literature. The papers citing the sky can be filtered by object type, waveband, and year. Moreover, when exploring this heatmap of the sky you can zoom into an area of interest and use the select tool to display the papers that cite that area of the sky.

You can find out more about the ADS All-Sky survey by reading this conference paper, watching this presentation at dotAstronomy 4, or visiting the project page on the Seamless Astronomy website.

The ADS All Sky Survey, a NASA-funded project, is developed at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA.