SDSS data management and photometric quality assessment

By Željko Ivezic´, Robert Lupton, David Schlegel, B. Boroski, J. Adelman-McCarthy, Brian Yanny, S. Kent, C. Stoughton, Douglas P. Finkbeiner, Nikhil Padmanabhan and 17 more. 2004

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We summarize the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data acquisition and processing steps, and describe runQA, a pipeline designed for automated data quality assessment. In particular, we show how the position of the stellar locus in color-color diagrams can be used to estimate the accuracy of photometric zeropoint calibration to better than 0.01 mag in 0.03 deg2 patches. Using this method, we estimate that typical photometric zeropoint calibration errors for SDSS imaging data are not larger than ∼0.01 mag in the g, r, and i bands, 0.02 mag in the z band, and 0.03 mag in the u band (root-mean-scatter for zeropoint offsets). (© 2004 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

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Citations in the corpus

THE DISCOVERY AND ANALYSIS OF VERY METAL-POOR STARS IN THE GALAXY (2005, methodology): “The SDSS has already generated the largest homogeneous catalog of wellcalibrated photometry for Galactic stars, using the broad-band ugriz system (see, e.g., Ivezić et al. 2004).”
A SURVEY OF z ∼ 6 QUASARS IN THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY DEEP STRIPE. II. DISCOVERY OF SIX QUASARS AT zAB>21 (2009, methodology): “The images were processed using specialized software (Lupton et al. 2001), and were photometrically (Tucker et al. 2006; Ivezić et al. 2004) and astrometrically (Pier et al. 2003) calibrated using observations of a set of primary standard stars (Smith et al. 2002) on a neighboring 20-inch…”
Clustering Analyses of 300,000 Photometrically Classified Quasars. I. Luminosity and Redshift Evolution in Quasar Bias (2006, background): “…SDSS (e.g., York et al. 2000), including superior photometry (e.g., Fukugita et al. 1996; Gunn et al. 1998; Lupton, Gunn & Szalay 1999; Hogg et al. 2001; Smith et al. 2002; Ivezic et al. 2004), astrometry (e.g., Pier et al. 2003), and data acquisition (e.g., Gunn et al. 2006; Tucker et al. 2006).”
First Measurement of the Clustering Evolution of Photometrically Classified Quasars (2005, background): “…large redshift surveys such as the Two Degree Field (2dF) Galaxy Redshift Survey (Colless et al. 2001) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; Gunn et al. 1998; Lupton et al. 1999; York et al. 2000; Hogg et al. 2001; Smith et al. 2002; Stoughton et al. 2002; Pier et al. 2003; Ivezic et al. 2004).”
PHOTOMETRIC CALIBRATION OF THE FIRST 1.5 YEARS OF THE PAN-STARRS1 SURVEY (2012, methodology): “This is one of a number of related techniques; we could alternatively have used the principal color analysis of Ivezić et al. (2004) or the stellar locus regression of High et al. (2009).”
THE SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF MONO-ABUNDANCE SUB-POPULATIONS OF THE MILKY WAY DISK (2011, methodology): “…2003), source identification, deblending, and photometry (Lupton et al. 2001), calibration (Fukugita et al. 1996; Hogg et al. 2001; Smith et al. 2002; Ivezić et al. 2004; Padmanabhan et al. 2008), and spectroscopic fiber placement (Blanton et al. 2003), are performed with automated SDSS software.”
The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: Direct constraints on blue galaxy intrinsic alignments at intermediate redshifts (2009, methodology): “The imaging was carried out by drift-scanning the sky in photometric conditions (Hogg et al. 2001; Ivezić et al. 2004), in five bands (ugriz) (Fukugita et al. 1996; Smith et al. 2002) using a specially-designed wide-field camera (Gunn et al. 1998).”
A Galaxy Photometric Redshift Catalog for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 6 (2007, methodology): “In this paper, we present a publicly available galaxy photometric redshift catalog for the Sixth Data Release (DR6) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) imaging catalog (Blanton et al. 2003; Eisenstein et al. 2001; Gunn et al. 1998; Ivezić et al. 2004; Strauss et al. 2002; York et al. 2000).”
Light and motion in SDSS Stripe 82: The catalogues (2008, methodology): “The images are automatically processed through specialised pipelines (Lupton, Gunn & Szalay 1999; Lupton et al. 2001; Hogg et al. 2001; Stoughton et al. 2002; Ivezić et al. 2004) producing corrected images, object catalogues, astrometric solutions, calibrated fluxes and many other data products.”
CONSTRAINING THE AGE–ACTIVITY RELATION FOR COOL STARS: THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY DATA RELEASE 5 LOW-MASS STAR SPECTROSCOPIC SAMPLE (2007, background): “The SDSS (Gunn et al. 1998; Fukugita et al. 1996; York et al. 2000; Hogg et al. 2001; Gunn et al. 2006; Ivezić et al. 2004; Pier et al. 2003; Smith et al. 2002; Stoughton et al. 2002; Tucker et al. 2006) provides excellent quality spectroscopic and photometric data for examining the properties of…”
THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY-II SUPERNOVA SURVEY: SEARCH ALGORITHM AND FOLLOW-UP OBSERVATIONS (2007, background): “Our version of Photo does not identify sources in the images or perform photometric measurements (Hogg et al. 2001; Smith et al. 2002; Ivezić et al. 2004; Tucker et al. 2006), as they are not appropriate for efficiently identifying SN candidates, which are usually blended with their host galaxies.”
The Third Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2004, background): “This magnitude diﬀerence typically is large under conditions in which the seeing is varying rapidly (see the discussion in Ivezi´c et al. 2004).”
A MaxBCG Catalog of 13,823 Galaxy Clusters from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2007, background): “Photometric errors are typically limited at bright magnitudes by systematic uncertainties at the ≤3% level (Ivezić et al. 2004).”
The Fifth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2007, background): “Constancy of stellar population colors shows that photometric calibration over the survey area is accurate to roughly 0.02 mag in the g, r, and i bands, and 0.03 mag in u and z ( Ivezić et al. 2004).”
Low-Mass Dwarf Template Spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2006, background): “SDSS Photometry The SDSS (York et al. 2000; Gunn et al. 1998, 2006; Fukugita et al. 1996; Hogg et al. 2001; Smith et al. 2002; Stoughton et al. 2002; Abazajian et al. 2003, 2004, 2005; Pier et al. 2003; Ivezić et al. 2004; Adelman-McCarthy et al. 2006) has revolutionized optical astronomy.”
A universal ultraviolet–optical colour–colour–magnitude relation of galaxies★ (2011, background): “Systematic uncertainties of SDSS point-source photometry do not exceed 1 per cent (Ivezić et al. 2004) in gr, whereas for extended sources they may be a few times larger.”
Constraining the Evolution of the Ionizing Background and the Epoch of Reionization with z ∼ 6 Quasars. II. A Sample of 19 Quasars (2005, methodology): “The imaging data are processed by the astrometric pipeline (Pier et al. 2003) and the photometric pipeline (Lupton et al. 2001), and are photometrically calibrated to a standard star network (Smith et al. 2002; see also Hogg et al. 2001, Ivezic et al. 2004, Tucker et al. 2005).”
Biases in Virial Black Hole Masses: An SDSS Perspective (2007, methodology): “The imaging data are taken on dark photometric nights of good seeing (Hogg et al. 2001), are calibrated photometrically (Smith et al. 2002; Ivezić et al. 2004; Tucker et al. 2006) and astrometrically (Pier et al. 2003), and object parameters are measured (Lupton et al. 2001; Stoughton et al. 2002).”
Detection of the Baryon Acoustic Peak in the Large-Scale Correlation Function of SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies (2005, methodology): “Image processing (Lupton et al. 2001; Stoughton et al. 2002; Pier et al. 2003; Ivezić et al. 2004) and calibration (Hogg et al. 2001; Smith, Tucker et al. 2002) allow one to select galaxies, quasars, and stars for follow-up spectroscopy with twin fiber-fed double-spectrographs.”