Mapping the Universe

If you think it’s ambitious to map the entire earth, check out the Sloan Digital Sky Survey According to their website: “the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is the most ambitious astronomical survey project ever undertaken. The survey will map in detail one-quarter of the entire sky, determining the positions and absolute brightnesses of more than 100 million celestial objects. It will also measure the distances to more than a million galaxies and quasars.”

They have already made quite a lot of progress, and their SkyServer offers all kinds of images and other data, and other cool tools for just exploring their data or for school and research projects