  The Australian National University's SkyMapper telescope is amongst the first
of a new generation of dedicated wide-field survey telescopes. Featuring a 5.7
square deg field-of-view Cassegrain imager and 268 Mega-pixel CCD array, its
primary goal will be to undertake the Southern Sky Survey: a six color
(uvgriz), six-epoch digital record of the entire southern sky. The survey will
provide photometry for objects between 8th and 23rd magnitude with a global
photometric accuracy of 0.03 magnitudes and astrometry to 50 mas. In this
contribution we introduce the SkyMapper facility, the survey data products and
outline a variety of case-studies in stellar astrophysics for which SkyMapper
will have high impact.
