The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

TL;DR

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a comprehensive project aiming to map a large portion of the sky using imaging and spectroscopy, providing valuable data on galaxies and quasars to advance astronomical research.

Contribution

This paper details the plans, current status, and instrumentation of the SDSS, highlighting its scope and expected scientific impact.

Findings

Survey will image five bands to magnitude 23

Spectroscopic redshifts for 1 million galaxies and 100,000 quasars

Repeated imaging will deepen data by two magnitudes in selected areas

Abstract

We summarize the plans for and the current status of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a digital imaging and spectroscopic survey of $\pi$ steradians in the northern Galactic cap. The CCD photometric survey will produce images in five bands to limiting magnitudes of order 23. The spectroscopic survey will obtain redshifts of $10^6$ galaxies (a complete sample to a limiting magnitude $r' \sim 18$) and $10^5$ quasars ($g' \sim 19$). Repeated imaging of a 200 deg$^2$ strip in the southern Galactic cap will yield information about variable objects and a co-added photometric catalog roughly two magnitudes deeper than the northern survey. A dedicated 2.5-meter telescope, a large multi-CCD camera, and two fiber-fed double spectrographs are under construction and should be operational by fall of 1995. The main galaxy redshift sample will have a median redshift $\langle z \rangle \approx 0.1$.