Wednesday 15 March at 3pm in Gemini HQ Seminar Room (note location)

Jill Knapp - Princeton U.

"The Sloan Digital Sky Survey"

ABSTRACT: "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey combines a digital imaging survey in five optical bands to a depth of about 23m and a spectrocopic survey of the brightest million galaxies and 100,000 quasars identified in the imaging survey. Initial results from the commissioning data include: the identification of a large sample of high reshift quasars (z > 3.5); the discovery of several weird objects, some of which still remain unidentified; the detection of field brown dwarfs, including the first methane dwarfs; and a map of the Galaxy's stellar halo which shows complex substructure and an edge at about 60 kpc. UKIRT has played a central role in the spectroscopic identification and discovery of several of the very rare objects. "