The SDSS-III BOSS survey is highlighted in this month’s 125th anniversary issue of National Geographic. This news update features a dramatic image of one of the 1000-hole SDSS-III plates used to place the fiber optic cables. Each fiber optic cable carries the light of a target in the sky to the BOSS spectrograph where its light is split apart to identify the nature of distant galaxies and quasars and how much the Universe has expanded since that light was emitted.