arXiv:astro-ph/0402616v1 25 Feb 2004 ADASS XIII ASP Conference Series, Vol. XXX, 2004 F. Ochsenbein, M. Allen and D. Egret eds. Palomar-QUEST: A case study in designing sky surveys in the VO era Matthew J. Graham, Roy Williams, S. G. Djorgovski, Ashish Mahabal California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA Charles Baltay, Dave Rabinowitz, Anne Bauer, Jeff Snyder, Nick Morgan, Peter Andrews Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA Alexander S. Szalay Dept. Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA Robert J. Brunner Dept. of Astronomy & NCSA, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA Jim Musser Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA Abstract. The advent of wide-area multicolour synoptic sky surveys is leading to data sets unprecedented in size, complexity and data through- put. VO technology offers a way to exploit these to the full but re- quires changes in design philosophy. The Palomar-QUEST survey is a major new survey being undertaken by Caltech, Yale, JPL and Indi- ana University to repeatedly observe 1 3 of the sky (∼ 15000 sq. deg. between -27 ◦ ≤ δ ≤ 27 ◦ ) in seven passbands. Utilising the 48-inch Oschin Schmidt Telescope at the Palomar Observatory with the 112-CCD QUEST camera covering the full 4 ◦ x4 ◦ field of view, it will generate ∼ 1TB of data per month. In this paper, we review the design of QUEST as a VO resource, a federated data set and an exemplar of VO standards. 1. A new era in astronomy The new availability of wide-field images from Schmidt telescopes in the 1940’s meant that astronomers no longer had to make educated guesses about where to look to find new and interesting phenomena but were now spoilt for choice. The advent of synoptic surveys presents more extreme opportunities; as an illus- tration, consider the SDSS which over the course of 5 years represents a factor 1