First Public Release of Digital Sky Data
By Mark Perew
Posted June 7, 2001

PASADENA, Calif.
From as close as a few light minutes away to as far back as when the universe was less than a billion years old, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is finding new and interesting objects across the sky. Two new record setting quasars and information on the distribution of asteroids were announced here today by the members of the SDSS collaboration. The announcements took place at the American Astronomical Society meeting being held here this week.

NGC 450 + companion

A monumental effort to digitally map the northern sky, SDSS has just released the first set of data used to commission the survey instruments. Three slices of the sky near the ecliptic and away from the plane of the Milky Way can now be studied by anyone, professional and amateur alike, at the survey website http://www.sdss.org/ or at the project's SkyServer website http://skyserver.fnal.gov. When the survey is completed in 2006, over 30 terabytes of data will be available online.

Colorful Nebulosity.

From these three small slices of the sky, SDSS is already finding quasars at distances unimaginable just a few years ago. Having found 26 of the 30 most distant quasars and having twice previously announced new records for the most distant quasars, SDSS is giving astronomers a glimpse of the universe at younger and younger ages. The two new quasars have a measured redshift of z=6.0 and 6.2. The latter is equivalent to a universe age of only 700 million years. An image of this quasar is available at http://www.sdss.org/data/qso62.web1.jpg (note that at the full-story site, you’ll need to drop the slash [/] to get their quasar pic link to function).
(The Full Story)

Dan