[ Thanks to An
Anonymous Reader for this link. ]
“The story begins back in 2003 when the Great Melbourne
Telescope was destroyed during the bush fires of January that year.“From the ashes rose the SkyMapper observatory, based in the
Siding Spring Observatory at the safer central-west NSW location of
Coonabarabran and tasked with scanning the night skies to create
the Southern Sky Survey.“A deep digital map of the southern sky, the Southern Sky Survey
— with a little help from the National Computational
Infrastructure (NCI) National Facility — will allow astronomers to
study interstellar objects ranging from nearby asteroids to
super-distant objects like quasars. “