The Fifth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

TL;DR

The Fifth Data Release of SDSS provides extensive imaging and spectroscopic data, including new features like photometric redshifts and survey geometry tools, supporting diverse astronomical research.

Contribution

This release offers a comprehensive dataset with new catalog features and the first SEGUE spectroscopic data, advancing large-scale sky surveys.

Findings

Includes 217 million objects with five-band photometry

Contains over 1 million galaxy, quasar, and star spectra

Introduces new catalog features like photometric redshifts

Abstract

This paper describes the Fifth Data Release (DR5) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). DR5 includes all survey quality data taken through June 2005 and represents the completion of the SDSS-I project (whose successor, SDSS-II will continue through mid-2008). It includes five-band photometric data for 217 million objects selected over 8000 square degrees, and 1,048,960 spectra of galaxies, quasars, and stars selected from 5713 square degrees of that imaging data. These numbers represent a roughly 20% increment over those of the Fourth Data Release; all the data from previous data releases are included in the present release. In addition to "standard" SDSS observations, DR5 includes repeat scans of the southern equatorial stripe, imaging scans across M31 and the core of the Perseus cluster of galaxies, and the first spectroscopic data from SEGUE, a survey to explore the kinematics and chemical evolution of the Galaxy. The catalog database incorporates several new features, including photometric redshifts of galaxies, tables of matched objects in overlap regions of the imaging survey, and tools that allow precise computations of survey geometry for statistical investigations.