A core team of SDSS-III members is meeting this week at NYU to write the documentation for SDSS-III Data Release 9, scheduled for July 2012. This release willpresent the first spectra from the BOSS survey of galaxies and quasars.

One of the key aspects of each data release has been providing as much information as we can about every aspect of the data. Astronomers around the world continue to do new and inventive things with SDSS-III data, and the project strives to do its best to document the properties and caveats of the data to support such great new science.

Team members try to balance tedium and fun. Delegation appears to be an effective strategy. Here we rely on Jeremy Tinker (left), in charge of target tiling, and Ben Weaver (right), in charge of managing all of the bits of SDSS-III data, to do some of the heavy lifting. While the group currently meeting is leading much of the effort, the documentation for each data release represents the culmination of the work of many, many engineers and scientists across the entire collaboration.
(Image Credit: Michael Wood-Vasey)