The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is going to carry out a uniform survey of π steradians of the sky in the Northern Galactic cap and ∼ 225 deg² in the Southern Hemisphere. The survey consists of a photometric and a spectroscopic survey. The SDSS will generate accurate photometry in five bands of approximately tens of millions of galaxies, tens of millions of stars and roughly a million quasars. It will also take spectra and measure redshifts of approximately a million galaxies and ten thousand quasars. The main characteristics and components of the survey are a dedicated 2.5m telescope, wide field correctors for photometry and spectroscopy that will provide a field of view of ∼ 3 degrees, a photometric camera with 30 photometric and 22 astrometric CCDs, and two fibre-fed spectrographs of 320 fibres each. The survey will produce a publicly available science database of Terabytes dimensions. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.