The Sloan Digital Sky Survey
1 November 2024 @ 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm GMT
Talk by Dr. Anne-Marie Weijmans from the University of St Andrews. In person at the Augustine United Church and on YouTube. Visitors always welcome.
We will also have the Sky in November.
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/
Anne-Marie is a Reader in Astrophysics at the University of St Andrews. She did her undergraduate studies and obtained her PhD at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and then moved to the University of Toronto in Canada for a postdoctoral fellowship, before taking up a faculty position in St Andrews. Her research focuses on the structure and evolution of galaxies, and she uses dynamical modelling techniques to map the dark matter content of nearby galaxies. Anne-Marie is the Data Products Manager for the fifth generation of Sloan Digital Sky Surveys, SDSS-V, where she is responsible for public data releases. She also used to be the lead observer for the MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache point observatory) survey.
Anne-Marie is the director of Shine, an interdisciplinary public engagement program that explores light and its use in astronomical research through science, art and music, and in her spare time she plays the oboe and cor anglais at the Music Centre in St Andrews.
Image credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)