Speaker
Description
Next year the Fifth Generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS-V) will launch the 20th SDSS public data release, 25 years after its very first early data release appeared on-line in 2001. Much has changed in SDSS over that time: telescopes have been added, new instruments have been built, and old instruments have been retired. What has remained however is the commitment to make SDSS data publicly available and accessible, which over the years has led to over 10,000 published papers that use SDSS data, and various educational and outreach projects that incorporate SDSS data. Behind all that lies a data infrastructure that constantly adapts to the needs of the SDSS collaboration and the astronomical community. This data infrastructure encompasses not just archive and catalog servers, but also visualisation web apps and computing platforms, that help both experienced and starting astronomers to access and explore the SDSS data.
In this talk I will present changes made and lessons learned for the public data releases of the SDSS. I will provide an overview on how data releases are created, what they consist of, and how they are managed. I will also discuss how we involve SDSS collaboration members in the data release process, as they create value-added catalogs, and contribute to documentation and tutorials. I will also discuss some very recent changes in the SDSS data systems to support the transition from fibre plug plates to robotic focal plane systems (FPS) in SDSS-V, and the effect that this has had on our data releases.
| Affiliation of the submitter | University of St Andrews |
|---|---|
| Attendance | in-person |
