U.S.-Japan Cooperative Research: A Digital Sky Survey of theNorthern Galactic Cap

这是授予普林斯顿大学James Gunn教授的免费奖项，以支持与京都大学汤川遥菜基础物理研究所的Masataka Fukugita教授开展的美日合作研究项目。该项目允许几名日本天文学家参与由天文学研究联盟(ARC)实施的斯隆数字天空测量(SDSS)项目。SDSS将制作一张详细的北部天空半部到约23等等的数码测光地图。这张地图将被用来选择大约100万个星系和10万个类星体，这些星系和类星体将使用相同的广域专用望远镜获得高分辨率光谱。这项成像调查还将被用来为大约10个星系、类似数量的恒星和大约100万个类星体候选天体制作一个四种颜色的星表。这样一组数据的科学价值是巨大的。应用范围从对三维大尺度结构的关键研究到星系与其环境的关系，再到盘矮星的暗端光度函数。日本天文学家将合作设计和制造SDSS主马赛克CCD成像相机。

This is a no-cost award to Professor James Gunn of Princeton University to support a U.S.-Japan Cooperative Research Project with Professor Masataka Fukugita of the Yukawa Institute for Fundamental Physics, Kyoto University. The project allows several Japanese astronomers to participate in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) project being carried out by the Astronomy Research Consortium (ARC). The SDSS will produce a detailed digital photometric map of half of the northern sky to about 23rd magnitude. This map will be used to select about a million galaxies and a hundred thousand quasars for which high-resolution spectra will be obtained with the same wide-field special-purpose telescope. The imaging survey will also be used to produce a catalog in four colors of all detected objects in about 10 galaxies, a similar number of stars, and about one million quasar candidates. The scientific value of such a set of data is vast. Applications range from critical investigations of large-scale structure in three dimensions to the relationships of galaxies with their environments to the faint-end luminosity function of disk dwarf stars. The Japanese astronomers will collaborate in the design and fabrication of the SDSS main mosaic CCD imaging camera.