This is the SDSS-III Science Archive Server. It is currently only accessible to SDSS-III participants, who should first consult our wiki pages on data retrieval. For general information on SDSS-III, please consult the SDSS-III homepage.
The SDSS Science Archive Server (SAS) serves files produced and consumed by the SDSS data processing pipelines. See the datamodel for details on the formats of each individual file. For aspects of the data that are similar to SDSS-I and SDSS-II, you may find useful documentation at the SDSS web site or the Data Archive Server web site.
The SAS will be the main source of images and spectra for data produced by SDSS-III. It will also serve catalog information in flat file form. Catalog data will also be available in the form of the Catalog Archive Server (which will be similar in form to that of SDSS DR7).
The SAS itself provides direct access to the directory tree with the data, interactive forms that allow users to upload tables of data of interest for exploration of bulk download, and web pages for browsing data releases. The interactive features here are under development and not currently functioning.
You can also browse the raw directory structures. The intrepid can start at the top level and explore. However, for most users the recommended sources for the current data sets are:
More advanced users might want to get at the more detailed information in the full catalogs, or the raw data:
Finally, those downloading data for the purposes of reductions can find the data at STAGING_DATA, which is organized (nearly) identically to the corresponding area on sdsshost2 at APO.
From these directories, you can download files using rsync or an http downloader such as wget. We generally recommend rsync, using a command of the form:
rsync --password-file password.txt sdss@data.sdss3.org::sas/[my_path]
The standard SDSS password should be stored as one line in the password.txt file (which cannot be world-readable). Some may prefer the URL method for rsync access. In this case replace the above command with:
rsync --password-file password.txt rsync://sdss@data.sdss3.org/sas/[my_path]
Don't download the full directory tree without alerting us! We might have a better way for you to get all of the data if that is what you want. THYNC before you RSYNC!
Note: The following will be replaced with photometric searches based on sdss_sweep_circle(), sdss_circle() and sdss_findimage().
Each of these forms can be used either to browse a user specified data set, or generate a list of URLs of files corresponding to that data set. You can then save this list to disk, and use wget or any other bulk http download utility (eg curl) to download the whole list. If you saved the URL list an a file named sdss-wget.lis, you can use wget to download the files into a directory structure corresponding to that of the SAS with a command that looks like this:
bash$ wget -x -nH -i sdss-wget.lis
The --limit-rate, -c and --cut-dirs options are also likely to be of interest to SAS users; consult the wget documentation.
Mass download through rsync is also available. The command to use a SAS generated file for rsync looks like this:
bash$ rsync -vtHP --files-from=sdss-rsync.lis rsync://user@sdss3data.lbl.gov/??? .
The password is ????.