Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)

Speaker: Dr Anne-Marie Weijmans

Reader, School of Physics & Astronomy — University of St Andrews

Bio: Dr Anne-Marie Weijmans is a Reader in Astrophysics at the University of St Andrews.

Her research concentrates on the structure and evolution of galaxies and mapping their dark

matter haloes. She is the Data Products Manager of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys, and the

director of Shine: a project that explores the properties of light and its role in modern

astronomical research through science, art and music. She regularly gives public talks and

school workshops on various aspects of astronomy.

Topic: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey – 20+ Years of Mapping the Sky

Description: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has been surveying the sky for over 20

years now. The survey started originally with a camera to image the sky with its telescope in

New Mexico (United States) and then added spectrographs to measure the light distributions

from stars, galaxies and quasars. In recent years, the survey expanded to the Southern

hemisphere, and even more recently, it started to add time-domain observations to its

surveys, to monitor variable objects. In this talk I will discuss the history and technological

developments of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, highlights of scientific discoveries, and what

we can expect from SDSS in the next few years. And as SDSS was one of the first surveys

to make their data freely publicly available, I will also showcase its data archive, and

demonstrate how anyone who wants to take a look at a digital part of the sky can do so!