Subject Area:

Astronomical data

Description:

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is a multi-organization effort to gather deep, multi-color images covering more than a quarter of the sky and create 3-dimensional maps of celestial objects. The data is released annually to the general public as data releases (DR)'s.

The SDSS used a dedicated 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory, New Mexico, equipped with two powerful special-purpose instruments. The 120-megapixel camera imaged 1.5 square degrees of sky at a time, about eight times the area of the full moon. A pair of spectrographs fed by optical fibers measured spectra of (and hence distances to) more than 600 galaxies and quasars in a single observation. A custom-designed set of software pipelines kept pace with the enormous data flow from the telescope.

The data set and more info can be found at http://cas.sdss.org/astrodr6/en/.