Data Access

Data Products

DR20 builds upon DR19, and contains a wealth of new BOSS optical spectroscopic data using the FPS systems, including all optical spectra observed through February 2, 2025, while the APOGEE near infrared spectroscopic data products are carried over directly from DR19. For the first time, DR20 includes optical spectroscopic data from the SDSS-V FPS system on the du Pont telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory (LCO) in the Southern Hemisphere, alongside new data from the Apache Point Observatory (APO).

DR20 also includes 169 tiles of LVM-i optical IFU observations covering 6 targets, including an updated reduction of the Helix Nebula, which was previous released in DR19. This represents a significant preview of the Local Volume Mapper survey for illuminating interstellar medium and stellar feedback physics.

Also included in DR20 are updated SDSS-V targeting catalogs, prepared for the Black Hole Mapper and Milky Way Mapper science programs, as well as for open fiber programs. Collectively, all these programs are known as MOS (multi-object spectroscopy) programs. These target catalogs use several imaging and spectroscopic surveys as input, including optical and infrared data taken with the BOSS and APOGEE spectrographs during previous SDSS surveys.

As always, we are also releasing new Value Added Catalogs, with the addition of eighteen VACs and one Value Added Product (VAP) based on DR20 data products.

Access Options

Getting data

SDSS data products are most often searched using SkyServer for the SDSS Catalog Archive Server (CAS) with SQL and Jupyter notebook interfaces to the catalog data. Full flat files are available via the Science Archive Server (SAS), and each file has a corresponding Data Model.

You can also visualise BHM and MWM optical and infrared spectra in the SDSS-V webapp Zora, while to explore integral-field unit spectra you can use the brand new SDSS-V LVMvis webapp. You can work with the SDSS data in SciServer Compute, without needing to download any of the data files. We also have various tutorial Python notebooks available that you can download, and that are also available in SciServer.

All of the data access options are most easily selected from the SDSS landing page for DR20:

dr20.sdss.org

You can also download SDSS data to your own machine: have a look at the Getting Data page to get you started. If you are planning to download large quantities of data, check out the Bulk Data Download page for available options.

The Tutorials page has several examples available on how to work with SDSS data.

Previous Surveys

Spectra, catalogs and data products from previous surveys will remain available: see the SDSS-IV data access page. An overview of completed surveys in SDSS-I/II/III and IV, as well as information on how to access and work with the data, as well as data format descriptions, tutorials and caveats can be found on the Completed Surveys page.

Completed surveys in SDSS include:

Some of these data sets are now also available in the SDSS Legacy Archive at MAST, hosted by the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

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