The SDSS-III BOSS project has completed 202 survey-quality plates, which translates to 200,000 spectra already taken by this survey. The survey is now shutting down for the summer to perform essential maintenance, but will be back on the sky in the Fall for several more years. The goal is to obtain approximately 1.5 million galaxies and quasars over the whole sky accessible to Apache Point Observatory.

We provide here a first look at these new data as a “pie-diagram” which shows their distribution on the sky relative to previous SDSS data. In red, we show the new BOSS Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) that probe to a high redshift (greater distance) than the previous SDSS LRGs (shown in white) and the normal (MAIN) SDSS galaxies in yellow. As can be seen, BOSS will probe a much greater volume of the universe than these previous surveys.

We also show below the BOSS quasars in blue, which now probe an enormous volume of the Universe!

Diagrams courtesy of Michael Blanton (NYU)