Related papers: Spectroscopic Surveys: Present
The advent of the Virtual Observatory (VO) concept signals a pradigm shift in the way astronomy will be done in the era of information abundance and ubiquitous networking. Small telescopes will be playing a number of essential roles in this…
Policy Brief on "Latest Developments and Opportunities in Sky Survey", distilled from the corresponding panel that was part of the discussions during S20 Policy Webinar on Astroinformatics for Sustainable Development held on 6-7 July 2023.…
Variability in the sky has been known for centuries, even millennia, but our knowledge of it is very incomplete even at the bright end. Current technology makes it possible to built small, robotic optical instruments, to record images and…
We present the design and performance of the multi-object fiber spectrographs for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and their upgrade for the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). Originally commissioned in Fall 1999 on the…
Looking ahead to the next decade and imagining the landscape of astronomy in 2020, it is clear that astronomical surveys, large and small, plus extensive follow-up projects, will be a great engine of progress in our profession. Surveys have…
The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) III project, has provided the largest survey of galaxy redshifts available to date, in terms of both the number of galaxy redshifts measured by…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has created a knowledge gap between the Northern and the Southern hemispheres which is very marked for white dwarfs: only $\simeq 15$% of the known white dwarfs are south of the equator. Here we make use…
The Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) was an extremely successful european space mission that gave us an unparallel view of the Universe in the infrared, and provided us with hundreds of observations of star forming regions and bipolar…
Integral field, or 3D, spectroscopy is the technique of obtaining spectral information over a two-dimensional, hopefully contiguous, field of view. While there is some form of astronomical 3D spectroscopy at all wavelengths, there has been…
Orbital solutions for binary or multiple stellar systems that combine astrometry (e.g., position angles and angular separations) with spectroscopy (radial velocities) have important advantages over astrometric-only or spectroscopic-only…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) mosaic camera and telescope have obtained five-band optical-wavelength imaging near the Galactic plane outside of the nominal survey boundaries. These additional data were obtained during commissioning…
Here we review some of the main issues related to multi-wavelength source identification and characterization, with particular emphasis on the field of X-ray surveys carried out over the last years. This complex and time-consuming process…
The U.S. Virtual Astronomical Observatory was a software infrastructure and development project designed both to begin the establishment of an operational Virtual Observatory (VO) and to provide the U.S. coordination with the international…
Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundreds) of petabytes in the next decade. This exponential growth of new data both enables…
Much of the science case for the next generation of deep, wide-field optical/infrared surveys has been driven by the further study of dark energy. This is a laudable goal (and the subject of a companion white paper by Zhan et al.). However,…
The fields of Astronomy and Astrophysics are technology limited, where the advent and application of new technologies to astronomy usher in a flood of discoveries altering our understanding of the Universe (e.g., recent cases include LIGO…
Supernova cosmology surveys are traditionally time consuming, especially for the critical spectroscopic data. However, a single spectrum at maximum light may provide accurate distance estimation if recent developments hold. This could open…
We present a detailed observational strategy for finding Near Earth Objects (NEOs) with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope. We investigate strategies in normal, unbinned mode as well as binning the CCDs 2x2 or 3x3, which affects…
Despite the large budgets spent annually on astronomical research equipment such as telescopes, instruments and supercomputers, the general trend is to analyse and view the resulting datasets using small, two-dimensional displays. We report…
The angular power spectrum is a powerful statistic for analysing cosmological signals imprinted in the clustering of matter. However, current galaxy and quasar surveys cover limited portions of the sky, and are contaminated by systematics…