Author: Karen Masters

Wear the SDSS-III BOSS Data

/ Karen Masters / Leave a comment

The STEM inspired women’s fashion line “Shenova” has released it’s latest design – based on the final image of the SDSS-III BOSS catalogue. You can now wear this part of the SDSS!

This is one slice through the map of the large-scale structure of the Universe from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and its Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. Each dot in this picture indicates the position of a galaxy 6 billion years into the past. The image covers about 1/20th of the sky, a slice of the Universe 6 billion light-years wide, 4.5 billion light-years high, and 500 million light-years thick. Color indicates distance from Earth, ranging from yellow on the near side of the slice to purple on the far side. Galaxies are highly clustered, revealing superclusters and voids whose presence is seeded in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This image contains 48,741 galaxies, about 3% of the full survey dataset. Grey patches are small regions without survey data. Image credit: Daniel Eisenstein and the SDSS-III collaboration

As designed, Holly Renee describes, she added a colour gradient to the image on the dress to give it “distance and sparkle”. The dress is a turtleneck sheath style, but custom orders are also possible.

Screen Shot 2016-09-06 at 14.13.56

Check it out here: Shenova Online Store

Also worth a look is the Shenova Gravitational Wave Dress, which by coincidence is currently modeled on their front page by SDSS member, Prof. Kelly Holley-Bockelman from Vanderbilt University (the lead scientist for the SDSS Faculty and Student Team (FAST) initiative) as she gave a recent TEDx talk on her research work: “The Spacetime Symphony of Gravitational Waves“.

Screen Shot 2016-09-06 at 14.07.35

(Please note that SDSS receives no funds from the sale of either of these dresses, we just think they’re awesome celebrations of science and women’s fashion).

Tweep of the Week: Audrey Oravetz

/ Karen Masters / Leave a comment

This week our @sdssurveys Twitter account will be run by SDSS observer, Audrey Oravetz. Audrey is part of the staff of observers and fiber optic technicians (the people who plug optical fibers into the plates) working for SDSS at our survey telescope in Apache Point, New Mexico (our telescope is neither automated, nor robotic, despite the common misconception!).

Audrey Oravetz

SDSS Observer, Audrey Oravetz (she’s definitely not a robot).

Here’s Audrey introducing herself in her own words:

Hello. My name is Audrey Oravetz and I have worked as an observer for the 2.5m SDSS telescope for the past nine years. It was always a dream of mine to work at a high-ranking observatory. I enjoy working alongside my colleagues to output a high quantity of quality data for the SDSS projects.

I graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007 with a B.A. in Astrophysics and graduated from NMSU with a M.S. degree last summer. My thesis (under the supervision of Dr. Rene Walterbos (NMSU)) was centered around the study of ionizing H-alpha photons within two star formation nebulae, NGC346 and NGC602, within the SMC.

A Docufeest in New York.

/ Karen Masters / 3 Comments

This week many of the Key People in SDSS-IV have been meeting in New York to get a good start on the Documentation that is needed to accompany the upcoming Thirteenth Data Release (DR13) of the surveys (scheduled for July 2016).

Docufeest (scientists working on laptops)

SDSS-IV scientists hard at work at Docufeest.

Here a storify from Twitter of all the documentation fun we have been having at Docufeest. You will have to wait to see the updated website until the summer.