Craig Loomis

TL;DR: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) as discussed by the authors provides the data to support detailed investigations of the distribution of luminous and non-luminous matter in the universe: a photometrically and astrometrically calibrated digital imaging survey of π sr above about Galactic latitude 30° in five broad optical bands to a depth of g' ~ 23 mag.

TL;DR: SDSS-III as discussed by the authors is a program of four spectroscopic surveys on three scientific themes: dark energy and cosmological parameters, the history and structure of the Milky Way, and the population of giant planets around other stars.

TL;DR: The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) as discussed by the authors was designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large-scale structure.

TL;DR: In this paper, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) presented the first spectroscopic data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), along with the data presented in previous data releases.

TL;DR: The first data release of SDSS-III (and the eighth counting from the beginning of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is described in this paper, which includes five-band imaging of roughly 5200 deg^2 in the Southern Galactic Cap.