Getting Started tells you what types of data you can find on SkyServer, what data each of the tools will return, and how you can best use the tools to study the sky.

Famous Places presents a gallery of beautiful images, various large galaxies, and some of the most distant quasars ever discovered.

Get Images lets you download of individual images and spectra at various zoom levels. Go here if you want to save a nice picture for a screen background.

Scrolling Sky lets you enjoy the sight of the sky moving on the screen as the SDSS telescope sees it when it scans along on its nightly cycle.

Visual Tools

• Finding Chart returns a JPEG image centered on (ra,dec), of size (height x width)where the image is scaled to an arbitrary scale (scale). Various drawing options can be specified (opt).
• Navigate lets you interactively navigate the sky, by clicking and zooming.
• Image List is a cutout service that generates small JPEG images for up to 1000 user-provided positions on the sky.
• Quick Look lets you view basic data for an object, such as its position, magnitude, and redshift
• Explore lets you interactively explore the various properties of individual objects.

Search allows you to search the database for sky positions, objects with a certain brightness, and and various other criteria. You can even enter free-format SQL queries, or use a simple form to search the database.

Object Crossid allows you to upload search the database for sky positions, objects with a a list of object positions, and returns the SDSS objects which are within a certain radius of those positions. A few simple upload formats are supported.

CasJobs allows you to submit unlimited SQL queries in batch mode and save query results in your personal database (MyDB).

Help is provided for those who would like to understand more about these tools, using SQL, and the properties of the objects stored in our database.

Download contains a few publications which explain our data in much more detail, and a few tools that can be ran on the user's computer, like the sdssQA, an advanced query tool written in Java.