The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will provide the data to support detailed investigations of the distribution of luminous and non- luminous matter in the Universe: a photometrically and astrometrically calibrated digital imaging survey of pi steradians above about Galactic latitude 30 degrees in five broad optical bands to a depth of g' about 23 magnitudes, and a spectroscopic survey of the approximately one million brightest galaxies and 10^5 brightest quasars found in the photometric object catalog produced by the imaging survey. This paper summarizes the observational parameters and data products of the SDSS, and serves as an introduction to extensive technical on-line documentation.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, AAS Latex. To appear in AJ, Sept 200

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is an imaging and spectroscopic survey that will eventually cover approximately one-quarter of the celestial sphere and collect spectra of %10 6 galaxies, 100,000 quasars, 30,000 stars, and 30,000 serendipity targets. In 2001 June, the SDSS released to the general astronomical community its early data release, roughly 462 deg 2 of imaging data including almost 14 million detected objects and 54,008 follow-up spectra. The imaging data were collected in drift-scan mode in five bandpasses (u, g, r, i, and z); our 95% completeness limits for stars are 22.0, 22.2, 22.2, 21.3, and 20.5, respectively. The photometric calibration is reproducible to 5%, 3%, 3%, 3%, and 5%, respectively. The spectra are flux-and wavelength-calibrated, with 4096 pixels from 3800 to 9200 Å at R % 1800. We present the means by which these data are distributed to the astronomical community, descriptions of the hardware used to obtain the data, the software used for processing the data, the measured quantities for each observed object, and an overview of the properties of this data set.

We describe the design, construction, and performance of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Telescope located at Apache Point Observatory. The telescope is a modified two-corrector Ritchey-Chretien design which has a 2.5-m, f/2.25 primary, a 1.08-m secondary, a Gascoigne astigmatism corrector, and one of a pair of interchangeable highly aspheric correctors near the focal focal plane, one for imaging and the other for spectroscopy. The final focal ratio is f/5. The telescope is instrumented by a wide-area, multiband CCD camera and a pair of fiber-fed double spectrographs. Novel features of the telescope include: (1) A 3 degree diameter (0.65 m) focal plane that has excellent image quality and small geometrical distortions over a wide wavelength range (3000 to 10,600 Angstroms) in the imaging mode, and good image quality combined with very small lateral and longitudinal color errors in the spectroscopic mode. The unusual requirement of very low distortion is set by the demands of time-delay-and-integrate (TDI) imaging; (2) Very high precision motion to support open loop TDI observations; and (3) A unique wind baffle/enclosure construction to maximize image quality and minimize construction costs. The telescope had first light in May 1998 and began regular survey operations in 2000.Comment: 87 pages, 27 figures. AJ (in press, April 2006

The Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (SEGUE) Survey obtained ≈240,000 moderateresolution (R ∼ 1800) spectra from 3900 Å to 9000 Å of fainter Milky Way stars (14.0 < g < 20.3) of a wide variety of spectral types, both main-sequence and evolved objects, with the goal of studying the kinematics and populations of our Galaxy and its halo. The spectra are clustered in 212 regions spaced over three quarters of the sky. Radial velocity accuracies for stars are σ (RV) ∼ 4 km s −1 at g < 18, degrading to σ (RV) ∼ 15 km s −1 at g ∼ 20. For stars with signal-to-noise ratio >10 per resolution element, stellar atmospheric parameters are 4377 4378 YANNY ET AL.Vol. 137 estimated, including metallicity, surface gravity, and effective temperature. SEGUE obtained 3500 deg 2 of additional ugriz imaging (primarily at low Galactic latitudes) providing precise multicolor photometry (σ (g, r, i) ∼ 2%), (σ (u, z) ∼ 3%) and astrometry (≈0 .1) for spectroscopic target selection. The stellar spectra, imaging data, and derived parameter catalogs for this survey are publicly available as part of Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has validated and made publicly available its Second Data Release. This data release consists of 3324 square degrees of five-band (u g r i z) imaging data with photometry for over 88 million unique objects, 367,360 spectra of galaxies, quasars, stars and calibrating blank sky patches selected over 2627 degrees of this area, and tables of measured parameters from these data. The imaging data reach a depth of r ~ 22.2 (95% completeness limit for point sources) and are photometrically and astrometrically calibrated to 2% rms and 100 milli-arcsec rms per coordinate, respectively. The imaging data have all been processed through a new version of the SDSS imaging pipeline, in which the most important improvement since the last data release is fixing an error in the model fits to each object. The result is that model magnitudes are now a good proxy for point spread function (PSF) magnitudes for point sources, and Petrosian magnitudes for extended sources. The spectroscopy extends from 3800 A to 9200 A at a resolution of 2000. The spectroscopic software now repairs a systematic error in the radial velocities of certain types of stars, and has substantially improved spectrophotometry. All data included in the SDSS Early Data Release and First Data Release are reprocessed with the improved pipelines, and included in the Second Data Release. The data are publically available as of 2004 March 15 via the web sites http://www.sdss.org/dr2 and http://skyserver.sdss.org .Comment: 24 pages, submitted to AJ. See ftp://ftp.astro.princeton.edu/strauss/sdss/dr2.ps for high-resolution figure