Plates in the SDSS context are round pieces of aluminum with holes in them to plug the fibers that collect the light from each astrophysical object. From 1999 through 2021, SDSS used these plug plates to perform our observations. These plates needed to be designed and drilled with a few months in advance so that […]
Search Results for: SDSS-IV
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, DR17, DR18, and DR19 describe changes to the optical spectroscopic data […]
Software Pipelines
Current Pipelines In SDSS-V DR20, we have data from the BOSS, APOGEE (unchanged from DR19), and LVMi instruments processed through several automated pipelines. The following table lists the current SDSS pipelines: Pipeline Instrument Mapper APOGEE Reduction Pipeline APOGEE MWM BOSS Reduction Pipeline (IDLspec2D) BOSS BHM, MWM ASTRA Data Analysis Pipeline BOSS+APOGEE MWM LVM Data Reduction […]
Reverberation Mapping
Summary The SDSS-V/BHM Reverberation Mapping (RM) project seeks to measure the time lag between variability signals in the quasar continuum and the response/echo from the broad emission lines, and hence make virial black hole (BH) mass estimates; aiming for a large and uniformly selected sample of quasars across a wide range of luminosities and redshifts. […]
SPIDERS
SPectroscopic IDentfication of ERosita Sources Summary The SDSS-V/BHM SPectroscopic IDentfication of ERosita Sources (SPIDERS) project aims to characterize a large sample of X-ray sources through an ambitious program of optical spectroscopic follow up. SPIDERS has two main science themes – the follow up of X-ray point-like sources (‘SPIDERS-AGN’), and the follow up of X-ray/optical cluster […]
BHM Targeting Cartons
This page provides a complete list of all BHM-led science target cartons that have been considered within SDSS-V, up to and including the DR20 data release. These BHM cartons can be grouped by a ‘targeting generation’ identifier. A targeting generation is simply a well-defined collection of versioned target cartons, which have been used at some […]
BHM Data
New data for BHM in DR20 BOSS spectra SDSS DR20 includes the release of a total of ~1.1M spectra for ~490,000 distinct objects primarily targeted for spectroscopy by BHM (a 3-4x expansion vs. DR19). These extend across nearly the full suite of main BHM science programs. DR20 includes not only northern and equatorial fields (from […]
BHM Science Programs
The two main pillars of the Black Hole Mapper project are: i) time domain studies of quasars, and ii) large scale spectroscopic follow up of X-ray selected sources. This core is complemented by a small number of supplementary BHM programs, which increase the scientific grasp of the project. BHM Time-Domain Programs The BHM optical (BOSS) […]
BHM Caveats
On this page we document a number of known issues with the BOSS data released in SDSS DR20. More general caveats not directly associated with BHM (and boss data) can be found on the general caveat page. Targeting Caveats Missing MOS Target Cartons and Semaphore Flag Descriptions In DR19, there are some cartons included in […]
Bulk Data Downloads
All data can be downloaded directly from data.sdss.org or dr20.sdss.org using the wget command, but is more efficiently downloaded from the SDSS data transfer node from dtn.sdss.org using the rsync method. Access is also available via Globus Online. The Data Model page has a description of the directory structure and file formats. Note that the […]