Late in the twentieth century, cosmology more or less hit the wall. The study of the universe was fractured into domains - the rate of expansion; the evolution of galaxies; the life and death of stars; the nature of the elusive dark matter. No one saw the universe as a single system with a structure, in which atoms formed gas, gas formed stars, stars collected into galaxies, galaxies into clusters, and clusters into superclusters.

What was needed, thought astronomer Jim Gunn, was a massive survey of the sky: the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It was a remarkable undertaking bringing together hundreds of astronomers who -- in spite of their own culture, personal inclinations, and best professional interests – created a three-dimensional map of the sky that was complete, detailed, and huge: a grand and bold thing.

Bringing together images of many millions of objects never seen before, the Sloan is providing so much information at such as fast pace that as one astronomer said, it’s like drinking out of a fire hose. They are watching galaxies forming and merging with other galaxies; seeing streams of stars swirling out from galaxies; and understanding how the bright smooth universe of the Big Bang evolved into the one we know.

Better yet, those stars and galaxies are all digitized and downloadable for easy searching on a personal computer - and available not only to professional astronomers but to the public as well. It's a gift to all fans of the universe and a testiment to human endeavor itself.


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For excerpts in Scientific American:
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For excerpts at The Awl:
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For the review in The Wall Street Journal:
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For the review in American Scientist:
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