Constructed and operated by The Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, SkyMapper Southern Survey is a wide-field survey telescope, situated at Siding Spring Observatory in central NSW, Australia. SkyMapper's mission is to create the first comprehensive digital survey of the entire southern sky. 


The SkyMapper telescope's digital camera captures a region of sky 30 times larger than the full moon every 20 seconds in multiple bands (g,r,i,z). It started operations in March 2014 and is expected to run till 2021. The latest Data Release is DR2 (Feb 27, 2019) which contains 505,176,667 objects. DR3 is also available but exclusively to Australian astronomers. Peranso supports DR2.



Details of the DR2 data, processing, and early analysis are presented in Onken et al., 2019, PASA 36, 33 (DOI: 10.25914/5ce60d31ce759).  The national facility capability for SkyMapper has been funded through ARC LIEF grant LE130100104 from the Australian Research Council, awarded to the University of Sydney, the Australian National University, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of Queensland, the University of Western Australia, the University of Melbourne, Curtin University of Technology, Monash University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory. SkyMapper is owned and operated by The Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The survey data were processed and provided by the SkyMapper Team at ANU. The SkyMapper node of the All-Sky Virtual Observatory (ASVO) is hosted at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI). Development and support the SkyMapper node of the ASVO has been funded in part by Astronomy Australia Limited (AAL) and the Australian Government through the Commonwealth's Education Investment Fund (EIF) and National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), particularly the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) and the Australian National Data Service Projects (ANDS).