The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Telescope
17.06.1998

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will soon begin. Pictured above is the 2.5-meter telescope poised to create the most ambitious sky map in the history of astronomy. SDSS will catalog one quarter of the sky down past 23rd magnitude ( R), obtaining redshifts for galaxies and quasars brighter than magnitude 19.

NGC 6070: First Light for Sloan
10.06.1998

The graceful spiral galaxy NGC 6070, 100 million light-years distant in the constellation Serpens, is helping astronomers celebrate "First Light" (the first test sky images) for an exciting new telescope built to perform the ambitious Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The SDSS 3D Universe Map
28.10.2003

The latest map of the cosmos again indicates that dark matter and dark energy dominate our universe. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is on its way to measuring the distances to over one million galaxies.

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from SDSS III
20.01.2014

How large do things appear when far away? When peering across the universe, the answer can actually tell us about its average gravitational history and hence its composition. Toward this goal, the Baryon Oscillation...

High Redshift Quasars
11.12.1998

Each red speck indicated above is a powerful quasar estimated to be over 100 times brighter than a galaxy. Yet in these Sloan Digital Sky Survey discovery images the quasars appear faint because they are extremely distant.

A Flight Through the Universe
13.08.2012

What would it be like to fly through the universe? Possibly the best simulated video of this yet has been composed from recently-released galaxy data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Every spot in the above video is a galaxy containing billions of stars.

The Sloan Great Wall: Largest Known Structure
7.11.2007

What is the largest structure known? The answer might depend on how one defines "structure." A grouping of galaxies known as the Sloan Great Wall was discovered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and is a leading candidate.

SDSSJ1430: A Galaxy Einstein Ring
28.07.2008

What's large and blue and can wrap itself around an entire galaxy? A gravitational lens mirage. Pictured above on the left, the gravity of a normal white galaxy has gravitationally distorted the light from a much more distant blue galaxy.

Reflection Nebula M78
24.04.2000

An eerie blue glow and ominous columns of dark dust highlight M78, a bright reflection nebula in the constellation of Orion. The dust not only absorbs light, but also reflects the light of several bright blue stars that formed recently in the nebula.

Methane Dwarf
3.06.1999

While hunting through Sloan Sky Survey data in search of distant quasars, Princeton astronomers Xiaohui Fan and Michael Strauss came upon an undiscovered type of object very nearby - now dubbed a methane dwarf. Marked...