Data Access
The survey makes the data releases available over the Internet. The SkyServer provides a range of interfaces to an underlying Microsoft SQL Server. Both spectra and images are available in this way, and interfaces are made very easy to use so that, for example, a full color image of any region of the sky covered by an SDSS data release can be obtained just by providing the coordinates. The data are available for non-commercial use only, without written permission. The SkyServer also provides a range of tutorials aimed at everyone from schoolchildren up to professional astronomers. The ninth major data release, DR9, released in July 2012, provides images, imaging catalogs, spectra, and redshifts via a variety of search interfaces.
The raw data (from before being processed into databases of objects) are also available through another Internet server, and through the NASA World Wind program.
Sky in Google Earth includes data from the SDSS, for those regions where such data are available. There are also KML plugins for SDSS photometry and spectroscopy layers, allowing direct access to SkyServer data from within Google Sky.
The data is also available on Hayden Planetarium with a 3D visualizer.
Following from Technical Fellow Jim Gray's contribution on behalf of Microsoft Research with the SkyServer project, Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope makes use of SDSS and other data sources.
MilkyWay@home also used SDSS's data for creating a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy
Read more about this topic: Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Famous quotes containing the words data and/or access:
“To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it—all my life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another owns a country.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)