This months public lecture will be held by Dr. Anne-Marie Weijmans, Reader, School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St. Andrews, discussing "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey".
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has been surveying the sky for over 20 years now. The survey started originally with a camera to image the sky with its telescope in New Mexico (United States), and then added spectrographs to measure the light distributions from stars, galaxies and quasars. In recent years, the survey expanded to the southern hemisphere, and even more recently, it started to add time-domain observations to its surveys, to monitor variable objects. In this talk I will discuss the history and technological developments of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, highlights of scientific discoveries, and what we can expect from SDSS in the next few years. And as SDSS was one of the first surveys to make their data freely publicly available, I will also showcase its data archive, and demonstrate how anyone who wants to take a look at a digital part of the sky can do so!
Dr Weijmans is a Reader in Astrophysics at the University of St Andrews, with a research focus on the structure and evolution of galaxies. She is the Data Products Manager for the fifth generation of Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS-V), where she is responsible for public data releases. Anne-Marie leads Shine, an interdisciplinary public engagement program that explores light and its use in astronomical research through science, art and music. She has developed and delivered several workshops on astronomy in primary and secondary schools, including at the Orkney Science Festival, and for the Royal Society of Edinburgh's school programme.
The lecture will be held in room 641 of the Royal College Building at Strathclyde University, at 19:30pm.