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Concept
Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Summary
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS is a major multi-spectral imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey using a dedicated 2.5-m wide-angle optical telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, United States. The project began in 2000 and was named after the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which contributed significant funding.
A consortium of the University of Washington and Princeton University was established to conduct a redshift survey. The Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC) was established in 1984 with the additional participation of New Mexico State University and Washington State University to manage activities at Apache Point. In 1991, the Sloan Foundation granted the ARC funding for survey efforts and the construction of equipment to carry out the work.
At the time of its design, the SDSS was a pioneering combination of novel instrumentation as well as data reduction and storage techniques that drove major advances in astronomical observations, discoveries, and theory.
The SDSS project was centered around two instruments and data processing pipelines that were groundbreaking for the scale at which they were implemented:
A multi-filter/multi-array scanning CCD camera to take an imaging survey of the sky at high efficiency, followed by
A multi-object/multi-fiber spectrograph that could take spectra in bulk (several hundred objects at a time) of targets identified from the survey
A major new challenge was how to deal with the exceptional data volume generated by the telescope and instruments. At the time, hundreds of gigabytes of raw data per night was unprecedented, and a collaborating team as complex as the original hardware and engineering team was needed to design a software and storage system for processing the data. From each imaging run, object catalogs, reduced images, and associated files were produced in a highly automated pipeline, yielding the largest astronomical object catalogs (billions of objects) available in digital queryable form at the time.
Official source
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