The Sloan Legacy Survey

The final Legacy Survey comprises a continuous 7,500 square degree swath of the high-latitude Northern Sky, three stripes totaling 740 square degrees in the Southern Galactic Cap and spectra of 860,000 galaxies and 105,000 quasars.

In five data releases, the SDSS gave the scientific community and the public nearly 7,000 square degrees of imaging with data on nearly 200 million objects and more than 800,000 spectra of galaxies, quasars and stars. These data supported studies ranging from asteroids and nearby stars to the large scale structure of the Universe.

An SDSS mosaic showing the galaxy M101 and its surroundings, combining g, r, and i band images. The region shown is 0.5 degrees by 1 degree.

Region covered by SDSS-I photometry
Region covered by SDSS-I spectroscopy
Region of the sky covered by the SDSS 5th public data release (DR5), in imaging (top), and spectroscopy (bottom). The Legacy Survey will fill the remaining gaps. Large Scale Structure from a slice of SDSS-I
Large scale structure in the northern equatorial slice of the SDSS main galaxy redshift sample. The slice is 2.5 degrees thick, and galaxies are color-coded by luminosity.