The SDSS SkyServer, Public Access to the Sloan Digital Sky Server Data

Abstract

The SkyServer provides Internet access to the public Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data for both astronomers and for science education. This paper describes the SkyServer goals and architecture. It also describes our experience operating the SkyServer on the Internet. The SDSS data is public and well-documented so it makes a good test platform for research on database algorithms and performance.

submitted for publication, original at http://research.microsoft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?TR_ID=MSR-TR-2001-104