Question about Digital Sky Survey

[bojan]

Hi all,

I am trying to help a friend with the assignment on uni..
It is about digitalisation and use of those technologies in libraries.

I was wandering if DSS CD's are available in libraries (for borrowing), and which ones are offering them?

Any feedback is much appreciated

[Astro_Bot]

I don't know about CDs and libraries, but the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data is publicly available for download along with the software to work with it - it appears to need *nix - all the commands/utils seem to be Linux or Unix, although there's a reference to Python in OS X as well.

Originally Posted by http://www.sdss3.org/science/

The SDSS data have been made public in a series of data releases; the most recent is the Tenth Data Release, which includes the complete SDSS/SDSS-II data. It includes links to the flat files in the Science Archive Server and to the catalogs and databases in the Catalog Archive Server.

The data seems to be here. But be careful:

Originally Posted by http://www.sdss3.org/dr10/tutorials/gettingstarted.php

First, a disclaimer: the full data volume of the DR10 sample is tens of terabytes (see this table for specifics). rsync (and http) are not designed for such large data transfers. If you really do need the full data set, please contact the Help Desk to talk to a data transfer expert who can arrange a custom transfer. This will be faster for you and easier on our servers.

There are tutorials (a good place to start) here and help here.

HTH

[Barrykgerdes]

The original DSS was made in the 1980's compressed to be held on 100CD's. It was made from plates from the Paloma and AAT between 1950 and around 1980. These 100 disks were further compressed using later technology to 20 CD's containing 15 GB of data. These discs were released through Software Bisque as a set around 1996.

This survey has now been superceded by a later survey. Access to the later survey has been provided on line by a number of planetarium programs. A stellarium variation for the ESO was made and is still available. It is called Virgo and uses these downloads superimposed on a background of the standard Stellarium display.

I have the 20 disc set of the original survey (Cost me $600) and a copy of the total set in a folder (15GB) in my main computers and all the display software. This database can be accessed through TheSky (ver 5) that I also have on a computer.

Barry