The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary
D. G. York
TL;DR
The SDSS paper outlines a large, calibrated imaging and spectroscopic survey conducted with a dedicated 2.5 m telescope and a mosaic camera, delivering five-band photometry and fiber-fed spectroscopy for hundreds of millions of objects. It details the hardware, calibration pipelines, data products, and survey strategies for both the Northern and Southern Galactic Caps, including target selection, tiling, and data processing frameworks. Early commissioning data validate the approach and reveal significant scientific potential, such as weak lensing signals, high-redshift quasars, and stellar halo structure, establishing SDSS as a foundational, publicly accessible resource for cosmology and galaxy evolution studies.
Abstract
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.