Are you looking to use SDSS Voyages to help explore the universe? Then this brief guide is for you.
Firstly what is SDSS? SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Surveys) is a series of surveys of the sky. While large telescopes can be used to study individual astronomical objects in exquisite detail, astronomers first need to find interesting objects to study like this. Also many fields of modern astronomy need large samples of objects. These could be using huge samples of galaxies to study the large-scale structure of the universe or studying millions of stars to try to determine their ages. Problems like these are best solved with large surveys of the sky. SDSS has conducted several different surveys using telescopes in New Mexico and Chile.
SDSS has carried out two different types of survey. One survey used a camera to take images of large regions of the sky in five different colored filters. The other surveys used spectra, to study the light from stars, galaxies and other objects in the sky in many different colors. These spectra allow astronomers to study things like how far away a galaxy is from the Earth or how hot a star is.
In SDSS Voyages you will meet both images and spectra. These will help you explore asteroids, stars, galaxies and other astronomical objects.
How do I get started?
If you are new to this website, we recommend starting on the Plan Your Voyage page, which provides a good introduction to the different parts of Voyages. Our Activity Descriptions pages provide an overview of our currently available resources and activities.
We invite you to send any feedback or activity requests to: outreach@sdss.org