18 February 2020First glimpse into Gaia’s astrometry – a progress report

© 2024 Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg | Webdesign et développement Alchimy.

Le 11 décembre 2015
De 10h30 à 12h00

Ulrich BASTIAN

ARI, Heidelberg

According to the official plan, the first astrometric data releases from Gaia are expected by mid 2016 (positions only) and mid 2017 (incl. parallaxes and proper motions). This is the time needed to collect enough data to make a global astrometric sphere solution mathematically possible, and then to understand and calibrate these data precisely and reliably enough to get meaningful scientific results from them. Both processes have been in full swing since mid 2014. We have collected 17 months of beautiful data, and we are getting more and more insight into the intricacies of the data, on the one hand – and into their great potential, on the other hand. I will show and explain some of the problems and initial failures encountered so far, and some of the successes achieved meanwhile. Latest news: Maybe the 2016 release will in fact give a quite significant bit more than “positions only”.