The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Talk by Dr. Anne-Marie Weijmans from the University of St Andrews

We will also have the Sky in April.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has been surveying the sky for over 20 years now. The survey started originally with a camera to image the sky with its telescope in New Mexico (United States), and then added spectrographs to measure the light distributions from stars, galaxies and quasars. In recent years, the survey expanded to the Southern hemisphere, and even more recently, it started to add time-domain observations to its surveys, to monitor variable objects. In this talk I will discuss the history and technological developments of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, highlights of scientific discoveries, and what we can expect from SDSS in the next few years. And as SDSS was one of the first surveys to make their data freely publicly available, I will also showcase its data archive, and demonstrate how anyone who wants to take a look at a digital part of the sky can do so!

More information: https://www.sdss.org/

Image credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)