The Palomar Digital Sky Survey (DPOSS)

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We describe DPOSS, a new digital survey of the northern sky, based on the POSS-II photographic sky atlas. The survey covers the entire sky north of delta = -3 deg in 3 bands, calibrated to the Gunn gri system, reaching to equivalent limiting magnitude of Bₗim 22 mag. As a result of the state-of-the-art digitisation of the plates, detailed processing of the scans, and a very extensive CCD calibration program, the data quality exceedes that of the previous photographically-based efforts. The end product of the survey will be the Palomar-Norris Sky Catalog, anticipated to contain > 50 million galaxies and > 2 billion stars, down to the survey classification limit, 1 mag above the flux detection limit. Numerous scientific projects utilising these data have been started, and we describe briefly some of them; they illustrate the scientific potential of the data, and serve as the scientific verification tests of the survey. Finally, we discuss some general issues posed by the advent of multi-terabyte data sets in astronomy.