The meta-caveat is that caveats will continue to be added as we identify them.
Current caveats
- If a result seems suspicious, look at the BOSS or APOGEE spectrum
- FieldIDs between 16000 and 100000 are designed as FPS commissioning and engineering fields. While valid science can be done with these fields, caution is advised.
- Field 016181 is a commission field where the telescope position was moved each exposure, so this field should not be used for science
- The line labels for the Ca II H & K lines in the BOSS Spectra PNG images are reversed.
- In the plate era data from the BOSS drp (FieldIDs < 16000), the gaia_g mags are gaia_bp magnitudes. These values have been corrected in the data visualizations tools associated with Zora.
- BOSS DRP (IDLspec2d) object classifications are primarily focused on the identification of galaxy vs. quasar vs. star. Although sub-classifications are provided, they are not optimized for accuracy. In particular, the CV star templates have more degrees of freedom than other stellar templates, which can result in unphysical solutions where negative PCA components of the CV templates can fit the absorption features of White Dwarfs. Fixing this has not been a high priority since the primary classification of “star” vs. “galaxy” or “qso” is still correct.
- The corrected temperatures for M giants in DR19 ASPCAP are cooler than in previous post-processed ASPCAP products, because the temperature correction was extrapolated rather than being set a constant value
- The corrected ASPCAP metallicities of M dwarfs should be adjusted again using the equation in Qiu et al. (2025)
- Visual vetting shows DR19 SnowWhite classifications may be unreliable up to 20% of the time.
- Spectroscopic parameters from SnowWhite do not include 3D-corrections from Tremblay et al. (2013).