The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Telescope
Credit:
SDSS Team,
Fermilab Visual Media Services
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.
SDSS
is expected to store about 200 Gigabytes of data each night.
Astronomers will work to cull from
this information an unprecedented
three-dimensional view
of our local universe.
However, the SDSS
may one day be remembered not only
for the hundreds of millions of objects which it could see,
but for how it indicated the nature and composition of the rest of the
universe which it could not see.