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

Abstract

The SkyServer provides Internet access to the public Sloan Digi-tal Sky Survey (SDSS) data for both astronomers and for science education. This paper describes the SkyServer goals and archi-tecture. 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.

12 pages, original word document at http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/Papers/MSR_TR_01_104_SkyServer.doc