The All Sky Automated Survey

Goals

The All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) is a low cost project dedicated to constant photometric monitoring of the whole available sky, which is approximately 10^7 stars brighter than 14 magnitude. The project's ultimate goal is detection and investigation of of any kind of the photometric variability. One of the main obectives of ASAS is to find and catalog variable stars.

Equipment

Presently, ASAS consists of two observing stations, one in LCO, Chile (since 1997) and the other on Haleakala, Maui (since 2006). Both are equipped with two wide-field 200/2.8 instruments, observing simultaneously in V and I   band. For technical and historical details please refer to the Status and History pages.
ASAS system is fully automated, yet it is a pleasure to acknowledge the on site assistance by the OGLE observers (the OGLE telescope is visible in the background of the photograph).

Achievements

ASAS has produced extensive catalogues of variable stars (ACVS) of the southern hemisphere (dec < +28 deg). The majority (80%, as compared with GCVS) of these are new discoveries. All photometric V-band data of the southern hemisphere until December 2009 are available. Detailed description of the catalogues can be found in the ASAS Papers. Catalogue data is summarily described in the Catalogues section, and is available for Download.

In June, 2006 northern observational station ASAS-3N came into existence on Haleakala (Maui) and it has been collecting data in two filters (V and I ) ever since. So far selected fields in the Kepler field of view have been analyzed and about 1000 variable stars identified. This is described in section Kepler FOV. The remaining data are waiting to be processed.

In early 2010 the southern ASAS station underwent a complete hardware renovation and since June 2010 restarted observing the entire sky visible from Las campanas. We are currently working on making new ASAS data public.