The SDSS Data Release Supplemental (DRsup)

DR5 and DRsup are to be described in the DR5 paper, Adelman-McCarthy et al. 2007, ApJ Supplements, in press [pdf, 1 MB]

What DRsup contains

As described in about DR5, there are a number (about 361) "special" and "extra" plates in DR5, a fraction of which do not have imaging data associated with them in the DR5 CAS database. The purpose of DR supplemental is to make this imaging data (FITS binary table catalogs of objects along with corrected frames and auxillary flat file data) available to users through a DAS-style interface.

We are now making available images and associated catalogs from three categories of special runs. They are:

• A series of repeat runs (65 in all on both N and S strips) of the Equatorial Stripe in the Southern Galactic Cap (Stripe 82);
• Scans through M31 and the Perseus Cluster;
• Scans taken at low Galactic latitude as part of the SEGUE project; these runs were used to target stars on special plates.

It is intended that DRsup offers access to the SDSS imaging runs associated with these plates.

Here is the list of imaging runs available through DRsup.

While these runs are not yet archived in a CAS SQL database, they are available as part of a DAS (Data Archive Server) for DRsup, this is a flat-file web-based file server which allows retrieval via 'browser-tools' such as IE, Firefox or command-line interfaces such as 'wget' or 'curl'.

Each DR5 DAS interface has a parallel DRsup interface, including a FOOTprint server (is a given coordinate included in the DRsup) and a DR6sup retrieval form.

This is the list of DR6sup runs web-links

User caution!

Much of the data in DRsup is imaging at low Galactic latitude |b| < 25 degrees, and as such, there are highly crowded fields, and regions of high extinction. These data were processed with the standard SDSS photo pipelines. Since these pipelines were not designed to work in such crowded regions, the quality of the photometry in these areas is not guaranteed to be accurate to the SDSS quoted limits of 2% in color and r magnitude, nor is each and every crowded frame fully deblended; i.e. many fields are incompletely cataloged.

Additionally, for the repeat stripe 82 scans, some scans were taken in less than ideal seeing or photometric transparency, and the user is cautioned to regard the quoted errors on objects with care. No attempt was made to adjust the quoted errors to account for extinction, crowded field photometry, slight non-photometric conditions or bad seeing (FWHM > 2.0 arcsec).

Quality plots and tables are available on a run-by-run and field-by-field basis for DRsup. One may use the plots linked on the DRsup QA page to further determine the quality of individual runs and fields within the runs. See: Photometry QA for more information on interpreting runQA.