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The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Jon Loveday, Jeff Pier

astro-pharXiv:astro-ph/9809179

Abstract

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will carry out a digital photometric and spectroscopic survey over pi steradians in the northern Galactic cap. An array of CCD detectors used in drift-scan mode will image the sky in five passbands to a limiting magnitude of r' ~ 23. Selected from the imaging survey, 106 galaxies, 105 quasars and selected samples of stars will be observed spectroscopically. In addition, a smaller (225 deg2), deeper, southern survey will reach ~2.0 magnitudes fainter and will contain a wealth of information about variable sources, supernovae and proper motions. We describe the current status of the survey, which recently saw first light, and its prospects for constraining cosmological models.

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