The photometric calibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is a multi-step process which involves data from three different telescopes: the 1.0-m telescope at the US Naval Observatory (USNO), Flagstaff Station, Arizona (which was used to establish the SDSS standard star network); the SDSS 0.5-m Photometric Telescope (PT) at the Apache Point Observatory (APO), New Mexico (which calculates nightly extinctions and calibrates secondary patch transfer fields); and the SDSS 2.5-m telescope at APO (which obtains the imaging data for the SDSS proper).

Photoelectric data on the Johnson-Kron-Cousins UBVRI broadband photometric system are provided for a set of stars that have been used as spectrophotometric standard stars for the Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomy is changing. Large projects, large collaborations, and large budgets are becoming the norm. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is one example of this new astronomy, and in operating the original survey, we put in place and learned many valuable operating principles. Scientists sometimes have the tendency to invent everything themselves but when budgets are large, deadlines are many, and both are tight, learning from others and applying it appropriately can make the difference between success and failure. We offer here our experiences well as our thoughts, opinions, and beliefs on what we learned in operating the SDSS.

The Magellan Clay telescope is a 6.5m Gregorian telescope located in southern Chile at Las Campanas Observatory. The Gregorian design allows for an adaptive secondary mirror that can be tested off-sky in a straight-forward manner. We have fabricated a 85 cm diameter aspheric adaptive secondary with our subcontractors and partners. This secondary has 585 actuators with <1 msec response times. The chopping adaptive secondary will allow low emissivity AO science. We will achieve very high Strehls (similar to 98%) in the Mid-IR AO (8-26 microns) with the BLINC/MIRAC4 Mid-IR science camera. This will allow the first "super-resolution" and nulling Mid-IR studies of dusty southern objects. We will employ a high order (585 mode) pyramid wavefront sensor similar to that used in the Large Binocular Telescope AO systems. The relatively high actuator count will allow modest Strehls to be obtained in the visible (similar to 0.8 mu m). Our visible light AO (Vis AO) science camera is fed by an advanced ADC and beamsplitter piggy-backed on the WFS optical table. The system science and performance requirements, and an overview the design, interface and schedule for the Magellan AO system are presented here.

Images of the Crab Nebula have been obtained through custom interference filters that transmit emission from the expanding supernova remnant in He II lambda 4686, H beta, He I lambda 5876, [O I] lambda lambda 6300, 6364, [N II] lambda lambda 6548, 6583, [S II] lambda lambda 6716, 6731, [S III] lambda 9069, and [C I] lambda lambda 9823, 9850. We present both raw and flux-calibrated emission-line images. Arrays of 19,440 photoionization models, with extensive input abundance ranges, were matched pixel by pixel to the calibrated data in order to derive corresponding element abundance or mass-fraction distributions for helium, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. These maps show distinctive structure, and they illustrate regions of gas in which various stages of nucleosynthesis have apparently occurred, including the CNO cycle, helium burning, carbon burning, and oxygen burning. It is hoped that the calibrated observations and chemical abundance distribution maps will be useful for developing a better understanding of the precursor star evolution and the supernova explosive process.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has validated and made publicly available its Second Data Release. This data release consists of 3324 deg(2) of five-band (ugriz) imaging data with photometry for over 88 million unique objects, 367,360 spectra of galaxies, quasars, stars, and calibrating blank sky patches selected over 2627 deg(2) of this area, and tables of measured parameters from these data. The imaging data reach a depth of r approximate to 22.2 ( 95% completeness limit for point sources) and are photometrically and astrometrically calibrated to 2% rms and 100 mas rms per coordinate, respectively. The imaging data have all been processed through a new version of the SDSS imaging pipeline, in which the most important improvement since the last data release is fixing an error in the model fits to each object. The result is that model magnitudes are now a good proxy for point-spread function magnitudes for point sources, and Petrosian magnitudes for extended sources. The spectroscopy extends from 3800 to 9200 8 at a resolution of 2000. The spectroscopic software now repairs a systematic error in the radial velocities of certain types of stars and has substantially improved spectrophotometry. All data included in the SDSS Early Data Release and First Data Release are reprocessed with the improved pipelines and included in the Second Data Release. Further characteristics of the data are described, as are the data products themselves and the tools for accessing them.

We present the full spectroscopic white dwarf and hot subdwarf sample from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) first data release, DR1. We find 2551 white dwarf stars of various types, 240 hot subdwarf stars, and an additional 144 objects we have identified as uncertain white dwarf stars. Of the white dwarf stars, 1888 are nonmagnetic DA types and 171 are nonmagnetic DBs. The remaining ( 492) objects consist of all different types of white dwarf stars: DO, DQ, DC, DH, DZ, hybrid stars such as DAB, etc., and those with nondegenerate companions. We fit the DA and DB spectra with a grid of models to determine the T-eff and log g for each object. For all objects, we provide coordinates, proper motions, SDSS photometric magnitudes, and enough information to retrieve the spectrum/image from the SDSS public database. This catalog nearly doubles the known sample of spectroscopically identified white dwarf stars. In the DR1 imaged area of the sky, we increase the known sample of white dwarf stars by a factor of 8.5. We also comment on several particularly interesting objects in this sample.

We utilize Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaging and spectroscopy of similar to 53,000 star-forming galaxies at z similar to 0.1 to study the relation between stellar mass and gas-phase metallicity. We derive gas-phase oxygen abundances and stellar masses using new techniques that make use of the latest stellar evolutionary synthesis and photoionization models. We find a tight (+/- 0.1 dex) correlation between stellar mass and metallicity spanning over 3 orders of magnitude in stellar mass and a factor of 10 in metallicity. The relation is relatively steep from 10(8.5) to 10(10.5) M-. h(70)(-2), in good accord with known trends between luminosity and metallicity, but flattens above 10(10.5) M-.. We use indirect estimates of the gas mass based on the Halpha luminosity to compare our data to predictions from simple closed box chemical evolution models. We show that metal loss is strongly anticorrelated with baryonic mass, with low-mass dwarf galaxies being 5 times more metal depleted than L* galaxies at z similar to 0.1. Evidence for metal depletion is not confined to dwarf galaxies but is found in galaxies with masses as high as 10(10) M-.. We interpret this as strong evidence of both the ubiquity of galactic winds and their effectiveness in removing metals from galaxy potential wells.

The f/5 instrumentation suite for the Clay telescope was developed to provide the Magellan Consortium observer community with wide field optical imaging and multislit NIR spectroscopy capability. The instrument suite consists of several major subsystems including two focal plane instruments. These instruments are Megacam and MMIRS. Megacam is a panoramic, square format CCD mosaic imager, 0.4 degrees on a side. It is instrumented with a full set of Sloan filters. MMIRS is a multislit NIR spectrograph that operates in Y through K band and has long slit and imaging capability as well. These two instruments can operate both at Magellan and the MMT. Megacam requires a wide field refractive corrector and a Topbox to support shutter and filter selection functions, as well as to perform wavefront sensing for primary mirror figure correction. Both the corrector and Topbox designs were modeled on previous designs for MMT, however features of the Magellan telescope required considerable revision of these designs. In this paper we discuss the optomechanical, electrical, software and structural design of these subsystems, as well as operational considerations that attended delivery of the instrument suite to first light.

We present the design and performance of the multi-object fiber spectrographs for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and their upgrade for the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). Originally commissioned in Fall 1999 on the 2.5 m aperture Sloan Telescope at Apache Point Observatory, the spectrographs produced more than 1.5 million spectra for the SDSS and SDSS-II surveys, enabling a wide variety of Galactic and extra-galactic science including the first observation of baryon acoustic oscillations in 2005. The spectrographs were upgraded in 2009 and are currently in use for BOSS, the flagship survey of the third-generation SDSS-III project. BOSS will measure redshifts of 1.35 million massive galaxies to redshift 0.7 and Ly alpha absorption of 160,000 high redshift quasars over 10,000 deg(2) of sky, making percent level measurements of the absolute cosmic distance scale of the universe and placing tight constraints on the equation of state of dark energy. The twin multi-object fiber spectrographs utilize a simple optical layout with reflective collimators, gratings, all-refractive cameras, and state-of-the-art CCD detectors to produce hundreds of spectra simultaneously in two channels over a bandpass covering the near-ultraviolet to the near-infrared, with a resolving power R = lambda/FWHM similar to 2000. Building on proven heritage, the spectrographs were upgraded for BOSS with volume-phase holographic gratings and modern CCD detectors, improving the peak throughput by nearly a factor of two, extending the bandpass to cover 360 nm < lambda < 1000 nm, and increasing the number of fibers from 640 to 1000 per exposure. In this paper we describe the original SDSS spectrograph design and the upgrades implemented for BOSS, and document the predicted and measured performances.