Lecture: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Michael Blanton, PhD
Professor of Physics, New York University
Director, The Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics; Director, SDSS-IV

SDSS was conceived in the late 1980s as the first wide-field imaging survey using CCD technology, coupled to the first wide-field spectroscopic survey using optical fibers. It took until 1998 before there was a working imager on a new telescope. The resulting data, and its innovative public release, transformed astronomy and is the inspiration of numerous current programs such as the Rubin Observatory. Over the last 25 years, the SDSS has continued to diversify and grow. It currently operates on two 2.5-m telescopes, one in Chile and one in New Mexico, and a small array of 0.16-m telescopes, all observing the Milky Way and more distant objects in unique ways, still making its data public. Dr. Blanton will sketch this history and discuss the sorts of challenges SDSS has faced, and the teamwork and people that it took to overcome them.

Dr. Blanton is an observational astronomer who studies galaxy evolution with spectroscopic surveys. He received his PhD from Princeton University and was a postdoctoral researcher at Fermilab and New York University (NYU). For the last 20 years he has been on the NYU faculty.

Live at David Pecker Conference Room, Willcox Hall, Pace University, Pleasantville, NY or on line (link at www.westchesterastronomers.org)