Science and Art have had an everlasting dialogue of inspiring one another. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey continues this tradition in its scientific results, its hardware, and its conception. SDSS presents interesting challenges and opportunities to artists. Firstly, one of its primary missions is spectroscopic observations. Spectroscopy is both omnipresent in the rainbows, sounds, and […]
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DR18 Parameter Files
Parameter files are ASCII files with the extension .par. They are extensively used in SDSS data for storing moderate amounts of data in a form that is both human and machine readable. Parameter files are sometimes informally called ‘Yanny’ files, or, more rarely, ‘FTCL’ files. Originally, they were designed to be written and read by the […]
DR18 FITS Files
Most of the numerical SDSS data is stored in the form of FITS files. These files can contain both images and binary data tables in a well-defined format. FITS files can be read and written with many programming languages, but the most common ones used by SDSS are IDL and Python. IDL The Goddard utilities contain tools for reading and writing […]
DR18 Bitmasks
SDSS makes heavy use of the concept of a bitmask in spectroscopic target flags and other contexts. For the actual bit values for all SDSS flags, see the lists below. More detailed descriptions of the targeting bitmasks for the completed optical surveys and infrared surveys can be found in the DR17 release documentation. The page […]
DR18 SDSS Python template
Since SDSS has a goal of all new software being written in Python, a Python template is provided as a starting point and to encourage best practices. Extensive documentation is available on readthedocs and the source code is managed on GitHub. Note that while this package is referred to as sdss-python-template, the only part of […]
DR18 BOSS Pipeline
The SDSS Early Data Release (EDR) paper is the original resource for understanding the processing and data products from the SDSS, describing the pipelines and spectroscopic data products. Successive data release papers: DR1, DR2, DR3, DR4, DR5, DR6, DR7, DR8, DR9, DR10, DR11, DR12, DR13, DR14, DR15, DR16, and DR17 describe changes to the optical spectroscopic data reduction between data releases. The technical summary paper provides more general information on the SDSS-I survey, the SDSS-III summary […]
DR18 Software Packages
A number of software packages have been developed to aid in carrying out SDSS surveys and processing the data. Here we briefly describe the purpose and scope of some of these core software packages. Many packages have their own detailed documentation as well. Python Packages Most SDSS software is now written in Python and deployed […]
Education and Public Outreach
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is committed to working towards making the science and engineering results of our surveys accessible to the public. We are also enthusiastic about supporting the use of SDSS data for training and education. We aim to do this through informal and formal education, citizen science, news, and social media. A […]
BOSS Spectrographs
The two identical BOSS spectrographs were rebuilt from the original SDSS spectrographs. Each spectrograph has two cameras, one red and one blue, with a dichroic splitting the light at roughly 6000 Angstroms. The BOSS spectrographs were custom designed for BOSS, an SDSS-III spectroscopic survey that measured redshifts of 1.5 million luminous red galaxies and Lyman-alpha […]
Instruments
Explore below to learn more about the SDSS telescopes, the SDSS spectrographs, and the SDSS imager. Telescopes The Sloan Foundation 2.5m Telescope at Apache Point Observatory The SDSS uses a dedicated 2.5-m f/5 modified Ritchey-Chrétien altitude-azimuth telescope located at Apache Point Observatory, in south east New Mexico (Latitude 32° 46′ 49.30″ N, Longitude 105° 49′ 13.50″ […]