The Sloan Digital Sky Survey presents interesting challenges and opportunities to artists. Firstly its primary medium is spectra, somewhat more abstract than the typical sweeping celestial vistas that adorn both posters and press releases. Secondly, it, rarely for an astronomical project, leaves physical objects in the form of metal plates for every SDSS spectroscopic observation. […]
Search Results for: SDSS-IV
Fabry-Perot Interferometer
The APOGEE instrument has long been used for studying radial velocities (RV)s in stellar targets. Through SDSS-IV the standard quoted RV stability floor was approximately 100 m/s. In SDSS-V, there have been three hardware upgrades to improve and monitor RV stability of the APOGEE instrument. The first is the introduction of octagonal fibers into the […]
BHM Caveats
Optical Spectra Caveats As with any dataset, there are several caveats to watch out for when using the optical spectra released by SDSS. Some affect only a few spectra or a few data columns, while some others have wider impacts. Caveats are in many cases specific to the release and will be corrected in an […]
BHM Targeting Cartons
Scope This page provides a complete list of all BHM-led target cartons that have been considered within SDSS-V, up to and including the DR18 data release. The cartons are grouped by a ‘targeting generation’ identifier. List of targeting generations The table below provides a list of all distinct targeting generations presented in this data release. […]
Data Release Publications
With each data release, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey collaboration has published a Data Release paper, which describes the data, the data acquisition process, and other details of the project. The most current public data release of the SDSS-V is Data Release 18 (DR18), which was released in January 2023. Details of DR18 are described […]
Technical Publications
These technical papers describe various aspects of the technical operation of the original Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the SDSS-II’s SEGUE and Supernova surveys, the SDSS-III BOSS, APOGEE, SEGUE-2, and MARVELS surveys, the SDSS-IV eBOSS, APOGEE-2 and MaNGA surveys, and the current SDSS-V mapper programs. This list of papers is sorted by the phase of SDSS […]
Plates
Plates in the SDSS context are round pieces of aluminum with holes in it to plug the fibers that collect the light from each astrophysical object. For many years in SDSS we have used this plug plates to perform our observations. These plates need to be designed and drilled with a few months in advance […]
Using Bitmasks
A bit mask uses the bits in the binary representation of an integer as “toggles” to indicate whether certain conditions are met. For a more general introduction to this concept, consult Wikipedia or other online resources on the subject. Within the SDSS, the most common use of a bitmask is to indicate the status of […]
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 […]
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 […]