Here you can access SkyServer's Navigation Tool, which
provides interactive access to our images and data.
As you enter the Navigation tool, a new window will be launched.
This window shows a sky-globe in the upper left-hand corner.
There are white and purple stripes on the globe. The purple
stripes indicate where we have data in the database right now.
The white stripes indicate which parts of the sky will be covered
by the end of the survey.
You can rotate and tilt the globe by clicking on the little arrows
next to it. You can also select any part of the sky by clicking on the
globe at the appropriate place. Try to click on a purple area, since
those are the ones that contain data. Once clicked, the whole
stripe that has been just selected turns green. Each stripe is 2.5 degrees
wide, and about 120 degrees long. When you click on a stripe, a mosaic
image 2.5 degrees wide and about 1 degree high will appear below the globe.
We call this a mosaic image because it was pasted together from about
100 smaller SDSS images.
The length of the stripe on the mosaic image is vertical. You can move
along a stripe by clicking on the up-down arrows above the mosaic or
by clicking anywhere on the globe.
You can select the size of the mosaic from the ruler with the little bubbles,
probably familiar to you from various mapping programs.
Sizes range from almost 3000 pixels wide down to 739 x 284 pixels. When you
click anywhere on the mosaic, you will see a new view in the Zoom window.
In the Zoom window, you can inspect
SDSS images at their true resolution. You can change the zoom factor,
the size of the Zoom window images, by selecting the appropriate bubble
on the size selector for the zoom image.
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