Jordan Raddick

Johns Hopkins University | JHU · Department of Physics and Astronomy

We present SciServer, a science platform built and supported by the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science at the Johns Hopkins University. SciServer builds upon and extends the SkyServer system of server-side tools that introduced the astronomical community to SQL (Structured Query Language) and has been serving the Sloan Digital Sky...

We present SciServer, a science platform built and supported by the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science at the Johns Hopkins University. SciServer builds upon and extends the SkyServer system of server-side tools that introduced the astronomical community to SQL (Structured Query Language) and has been serving the Sloan Digital Sky...

The third generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) took data from 2008 to 2014 using the original SDSS wide-field imager, the original and an upgraded multi-object fiber-fed optical spectrograph, a new near-infrared high-resolution spectrograph, and a novel optical interferometer. All the data from SDSS-III are now made public. In part...

SkyServer is the primary catalog data portal of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that makes multiple terabytes of astronomy data available to the world. Here, the process is described of collecting and analyzing the complete record of more than 10 years of Web hits and SQL queries to SkyServer.

A comprehensive analysis of 10 years of Web and SQL traffic on SkyServer--the online portal to the multiterabyte Sloan Digital Sky Survey archive--shows the impressive reach of the SDSS to the research community and the public, and provides insight into how methods of e-science are being taken up by the scientific community.

Citizen science projects are those in which volunteers are asked to collaborate in scientific projects, usually by volunteering idle computer time for distributed data processing efforts or by actively labeling or classifying information - shapes of galaxies, whale sounds, historical records are all examples of citizen science projects in which use...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) “SkyServer” has long included online educational materials designed to enable students and the public to discover the fundamentals of modern astronomy using real observations from the SDSS database. Efforts are now being made to update and expand these activities to reflect new data from additional generations of...

Citizen science, in which volunteers work with professional scientists to conduct research, is expanding due to large online datasets. To plan projects, it is important to understand volunteers' motivations for participating. This paper analyzes results from an online survey of nearly 11,000 volunteers in Galaxy Zoo, an astronomy citizen science pr...

The Zooniverse projects turn everyday people into "citizen scientists" who work online with real data to assist scientists in conducting research on a variety of topics related to galaxies, exoplanets, lunar craters, and solar flares, among others. This paper describes our initial study to assess the conceptual knowledge and reasoning abilities of...

Virtual citizen science (VCS) creates Internet-based projects that involve volunteers collaborating with scientists in authentic scientific research. Understanding what motivates volunteers to contribute to these projects is key to their growth and success. After reviewing the existing research on motivation to volunteer in VCS projects, we present...

We present the data release for Galaxy Zoo 2 (GZ2), a citizen science project with more than 16 million morphological classifications of 304,122 galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Morphology is a powerful probe for quantifying a galaxy's dynamical history; however, automatic classifications of morphology (either by computer analysis...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has been in operation since 2000 April. This paper presents the tenth public data release (DR10) from its current incarnation, SDSS-III. This data release includes the first spectroscopic data from the Apache Point Observatory Galaxy Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), along with spectroscopic data from the Baryon Osc...

Recent technological advances allowed the creation and use of internet-based systems where many users can collaborate gathering and sharing information for specific or general purposes: social networks, e-commerce review systems, collaborative knowledge systems, etc. Since most of the data collected in these systems is user-generated, understanding...

Virtual citizen science (VCS) uses technology like the Internet to give volunteers the chance to participate in real scientific research. The success of VCS projects has prompted researchers to understand what motivates volunteer participation. 199 registered users of Zooniverse, a successful collection of VCS projects, completed a web survey asses...

In this paper, we obtain the photometric and spectroscopic data from the SDSS DR7 (Abazajian et al., 2009, Cat. II/294) for all objects classified as `galaxy' (Strauss et al., 2002AJ....124.1810S). (1 data file).

The Virtual Observatory (VO) is an international effort to bring a large-scale electronic integration of astronomy data, tools, and services to the global community. The Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) is the U.S. NSF- and NASA-funded VO effort that seeks to put efficient astronomical tools in the hands of U.S. astronomers, students, educato...

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large-scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i = 19.9 over 10,000 deg2 to measure...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) presents the first spectroscopic data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This ninth data release (DR9) of the SDSS project includes 535,995 new galaxy spectra (median z=0.52), 102,100 new quasar spectra (median z=2.32), and 90,897 new stellar spectra, along with the data presented in...

SkyServer is an Internet portal to data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the largest online archive of astronomy data in the world. provides free access to hundreds of millions of celestial objects for science, education and outreach purposes. Logs of accesses to SkyServer comprise around 930 million hits, 140 million web services accesses and 17...

The Virtual Observatory (VO) is an international effort to bring a large-scale electronic integration of astronomy data, tools, and services to the global community. The Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) is the U.S. NSF- and NASA-funded VO effort that seeks to put efficient astronomical tools in the hands of U.S. astronomers, students, educato...

We present a study of local post-starburst galaxies (PSGs) using the photometric and spectroscopic observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the results from the Galaxy Zoo project. We find that the majority of our local PSG population have neither early- nor late-type morphologies but occupy a well-defined space within the colour–stellar...

Building on the legacy of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-I and II), SDSS-III is a program of four spectroscopic surveys on three scientific themes: dark energy and cosmological parameters, the history and structure of the Milky Way, and the population of giant planets around other stars. In keeping with SDSS tradition, SDSS-III will provide reg...

Section 3.5 of Aihara et al. (2011) described various sources of systematic error in the astrometry of the imaging data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). In addition to these sources of error, there is an additional and more serious error, which introduces a large systematic shift in the astrometry over a large area around the north celestial...

We provide a brief overview of the Galaxy Zoo and Zooniverse projects, including a short discussion of the history of, and motivation for, these projects as well as reviewing the science these innovative internet-based citizen science projects have produced so far. We briefly describe the method of applying en-masse human pattern recognition capabi...

The Moon Zoo project affords volunteers the opportunity to contribute to scientific research in a meaningful way by interacting with actual scientific data. We created a survey to measure the impact that participation in Moon Zoo has on user conceptual knowledge.

Morphology is a powerful indicator of a galaxy's dynamical and merger history. It is strongly correlated with many physical parameters, including mass, star formation history and the distribution of mass. The Galaxy Zoo project collected simple morphological classifications of nearly 900000 galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, contribu...

We report the discovery of a population of nearby, blue early-type galaxies with high star formation rates (0.5

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) started a new phase in August 2008, with new instrumentation and new surveys focused on Galactic structure and chemical evolution, measurements of the baryon oscillation feature in the clustering of galaxies and the quasar Ly alpha forest, and a radial velocity search for planets around ~8000 stars. This paper de...

Morphology is a powerful indicator of a galaxy’s dynamical and merger history. It is strongly correlated with many physical parameters, including mass, star formation history and the distribution of mass. The Galaxy Zoo project collected simple morphological classifications of nearly 900 000 galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, contrib...

With its open data policy, survey mode of operations and data products with vast potential for discovery, LSST exemplifies the exponential growth of data volumes in astronomy and presents unprecedented opportunities for Education and Public Outreach (EPO). LSST will provide cyberinfrastructure and interfaces enabling users to visualize and interact...

Putting data into the public domain is not the same thing as making those data accessible for intelligent analysis. A distinguished group of editors and experts who were already engaged in one way or another with the issues inherent in making research data public came together with statisticians to initiate a dialogue about policies and practicalit...

Modern science is advancing at an unprecedented rate, and the amount of scientific data is doubling every year (1). These data have sparked a revolution in the way astronomy is practiced. No longer are scientists forced to wait months for access to a telescope to learn about the night sky; instead, entire research projects can be accomplished with...

Data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey can be used by students, teachers, and the public to contribute to scientific research.

Citizen science projects are gaining in popularity and are seen by some as a paradigm shift that will benefit participants, extend scientific research, and improve public understanding of how science is done. All projects engage nonspecialists in observations, measurements, or classifications that further some aspect of scientific activity. In astr...

We study the spectroscopic properties and environments of red spiral galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo project. By carefully selecting face-on, disk dominated spirals we construct a sample of truly passive disks (not dust reddened, nor dominated by old stellar populations in a bulge). As such, our red spirals represent an interesting set of possible...

We report on the finding of a correlation between the past star formation activity of galaxies and the degree to which the rotation axes of neighbouring galaxies are aligned. This is obtained by cross-correlating star formation histories, derived using the multiple optimized parameter estimation and data compression (MOPED) algorithm, and the spati...

We investigate the effect of dust on spiral galaxies by measuring the inclination dependence of optical colours for 24 276 well-resolved Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) galaxies visually classified via the Galaxy Zoo project. We find clear trends of reddening with inclination which imply a total extinction from face-on to edge-on of 0.7, 0.6, 0.5 a...

We use data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and visual classifications of morphology from the Galaxy Zoo project to study black hole growth in the nearby universe (z < 0.05) and to break down the active galactic nucleus (AGN) host galaxy population by color, stellar mass, and morphology. We find that the black hole growth at luminosities >1040 er...

We investigate the effect of dust on spiral galaxies by measuring the inclination-dependence of optical colours for 24,276 well-resolved SDSS galaxies visually classified in Galaxy Zoo. We find clear trends of reddening with inclination which imply a total extinction from face-on to edge-on of 0.7, 0.6, 0.5 and 0.4 magnitudes for the ugri passbands...

Citizen science, the process of volunteers collaborating with professional scientists in authentic research, is an area which has undergone great expansion and development over the last decade. As the internet and new media facilitate easier and more widespread communication as well as access to a variety of data sets, the number and variety of cit...

Our ongoing research program is examining the motivations of participants in the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project. At the 2009 AAS summer meeting, we presented preliminary results from a survey taken by more than 10,000 participants of the original Galaxy Zoo. We are continuing to analyze data from this survey. Galaxy Zoo is an online citizen sci...

The LSST Education and Public Outreach (EPO) program is described, including how it will be used to promote classroom research projects, deliver an on-going program of citizen science, and facilitate unprecedented visualization possibilities. In collaboration with the LSST Data Management group, an EPO database is being designed to accommodate anti...

The remarkable success of Galaxy Zoo as a citizen science project for galaxy classification within a terascale astronomy data collection has led to the development of a broader collaboration, known as the Zooniverse. Activities will include astronomy, lunar science, solar science, and digital humanities. Some features of our program include develop...

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a...

We analyse the environmental dependence of galaxy morphology and colour with two-point clustering statistics, using data from the Galaxy Zoo, the largest sample of visually classified morphologies yet compiled, extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We present two-point correlation functions of spiral and early-type galaxies, and we quantify...

We report the discovery of an unusual object near the spiral galaxy IC 2497, discovered by visual inspection of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) as part of the Galaxy Zoo project. The object, known as Hanny's Voorwerp, is bright in the SDSS g band due to unusually strong [O iii]4959, 5007 emission lines. We present the results of the first targe...

As our capacity to study ever-expanding domains of our science has increased (including the time domain, non-electromagnetic phenomena, magnetized plasmas, and numerous sky surveys in multiple wavebands with broad spatial coverage and unprecedented depths), so have the horizons of our understanding of the Universe been similarly expanding. This exp...

The Galaxy Zoo citizen science website invites anyone with an Internet connection to participate in research by classifying galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. As of April 2009, more than 200,000 volunteers had made more than 100 million galaxy classifications. In this paper, we present results of a pilot study into the motivations and demo...

We present morphological classifications obtained using machine learning for objects in SDSS DR6 that have been classified by Galaxy Zoo into three classes, namely early types, spirals and point sources/artifacts. An artificial neural network is trained on a subset of objects classified by the human eye and we test whether the machine learning algo...

We investigate a class of rapidly growing emission line galaxies, known as "Green Peas", first noted by volunteers in the Galaxy Zoo project because of their peculiar bright green colour and small size, unresolved in SDSS imaging. Their appearance is due to very strong optical emission lines, namely [O III] 5007 A, with an unusually large equivalen...

We report the discovery of a population of nearby, blue early-type galaxies with high star formation rates (0.5 < SFR < 50 M⊙ yr−1). They are identified by their visual morphology as provided by Galaxy Zoo for Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 6 and their u−r colour. We select a volume-limited sample in the redshift range 0.02 < z < 0.05, corre...

"Around the World in 80 Telescopes" was a record-breaking and unprecedented, live, 24-hour public webcast featuring most of the research-grade astronomical observatories both on and off the planet. It was part of the 100 Hours of Astronomy Global Cornerstone project of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. The goal of the webcast was to give me...

This paper describes the Seventh Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), marking the completion of the original goals of the SDSS and the end of the phase known as SDSS-II. It includes 11,663 deg^2 of imaging data, with most of the ~2000 deg^2 increment over the previous data release lying in regions of low Galactic latitude. The catal...

Galaxy Zoo is an online citizen science project involving over 170,000 volunteers who have classified the morphologies of hundreds of thousands of galaxies. In this study, we examine the motivations of Galaxy Zoo participants - what reasons do they give for offering their time classifying galaxies? Interviews were conducted with randomly-chosen par...

Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science website in which members of the public volunteer to classify galaxies, thereby helping astronomers conduct publishable research into galaxy morphologies and environments. Although the site was originally created to answer a few specific questions, some members of the community - both scientists and volunteers - have...

Wide-angle surveys have been an engine for new discoveries throughout the modern history of astronomy, and have been among the most highly cited and scientifically productive observing facilities in recent years. This trend is likely to continue over the next decade, as many of the most important questions in astrophysics are best tackled with mass...

Following the study of Darg et al. (2009; hereafter D09a) we explore the environments, optical colours, stellar masses, star formation and AGN activity in a sample of 3003 pairs of merging galaxies drawn from the SDSS using visual classifications from the Galaxy Zoo project. While D09a found that the spiral-to-elliptical ratio in (major) mergers ap...

We present the largest, most homogeneous catalogue of merging galaxies in the nearby universe obtained through the Galaxy Zoo project - an interface on the world-wide web enabling large-scale morphological classification of galaxies through visual inspection of images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The method converts a set of visually-i...

We analyse the relationships between galaxy morphology, colour, environment and stellar mass using data for over 10⁵ objects from Galaxy Zoo, the largest sample of visually classified morphologies yet compiled. We conclusively show that colour and morphology fractions are very different functions of environment. Both colour and morphology are sensi...

Galaxy Zoo is the first study of nearby galaxies that contains reliable information about the spiral sense of rotation of galaxy arms for a sizeable number of galaxies. We measure the correlation function of spin chirality (the sense in which galaxies appear to be spinning) of face-on spiral galaxies in angular, real and projected spaces. Our resul...

We present a sample of early-type galaxies selected by morphology only by Galaxy Zoo from SDSS DR6. We discuss their observed properties and provide a catalogue including derived properties such as star formation rates and emission line classifications.

In order to understand the formation and subsequent evolution of galaxies one must first distinguish between the two main morphological classes of massive systems: spirals and early-type systems. This paper introduces a project, Galaxy Zoo, which provides visual morphological classifications for nearly one million galaxies, extracted from the Sloan...

We re-examine the evidence for a violation of large-scale statistical isotropy in the distribution of projected spin vectors of spiral galaxies. We have a sample of ∼37 000 spiral galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, with their line of sight spin direction confidently classified by members of the public through the online project Galaxy Zoo....

Like all sciences in general, astronomy has experienced unprecedented changes in just the last few years. As the total volume of data continues to double each year, we struggle to collect and interpret all the data - and as EPO professionals, we struggle to bring this data to learners in a meaningful way. This rapporteur paper will review some of o...

Through funding from the NSF's Internship in Public Science Education (IPSE) program, Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and the Maryland Science Center (MSC) have worked together to create an exhibit based on JHU's research with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project to map the universe. The exhibit is a kiosk-based interactive presentation that conn...

In the astronomy education community, many of us use research data from large astronomical projects as part of the materials that we design. These large datasets can have many advantages for educators. Large datasets allow students to explore a broad range of astronomical questions, and teachers and students can be excited to know that they are loo...

We have developed Galaxy Zoo, a citizen science project in which volunteers classify images of galaxies by shape. The site has been hugely successful in reaching large numbers of people - more than 125,000 people have signed up. As a result, each galaxy has been classified more than 30 times, resulting in high-quality science results. We are study...

This paper describes the Sixth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With this data release, the imaging of the northern Galactic cap is now complete. The survey contains images and parameters of roughly 287 million objects over 9583 deg^2, including scans over a large range of Galactic latitudes and longitudes. The survey also includes 1.2...

Astronomy research has been undergoing an information explosion over the last few decades, with significant progress made in streamlining and simplifying Internet access to everything from telescope application processes to abstracts to multi-wavelength data. These access tools are now user-friendly enough to bring us into a new realm of teaching,...

Continuing the extraordinary legacy of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), SDSS-III will use the wide-field spectroscopic capabilities of the APO 2.5-meter telescope to carry out four surveys on three scientific themes: dark energy and cosmological parameters; the structure, dynamics, and chemical evolution of the Milky Way; and the structure of g...

An interesting question in modern astrophysics research is the relationship between a galaxy's morphology (appearance) and its formation and evolutionary history. Research into this question is complicated by the fact that to get a study sample, researchers must first assign a shape to a large number of galaxies. Classifying a galaxy by shape is ne...

This paper describes the Fifth Data Release (DR5) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). DR5 includes all survey quality data taken through 2005 June and represents the completion of the SDSS-I project (whose successor, SDSS-II, will continue through mid-2008). It includes five-band photometric data for 217 million objects selected over 8000 deg2...

The SkyServer is an Internet portal to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Catalog Archive Server. From 2001 to 2006, there were a million visitors in 3 million sessions generating 170 million Web hits, 16 million ad-hoc SQL queries, and 62 million page views. The site currently averages 35 thousand visitors and 400 thousand sessions per month. The Web an...

We have been developing and maintaining the SkyServer web site (http://skyserver.sdss.org), which offers the complete dataset of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to educators, for the past five years. We have developed tools for displaying and searching the data, both as images and measured parameters. We have also developed a set of exercises that use...

The START Collaboratory is a three-year, NSF-funded project to create a Web-based national astronomy research collaboratory for high school students that will bring authentic scientific research to classrooms across the country. The project brings together the resources and experience of Hands-On Universe at the University of California at Berkeley...

The potential for education and outreach with the LSST is as far reaching as the telescope itself. The LSST data will be open to the public and scientists around the world -- anyone with a web browser will be able to access and analyze images, data products, tools, and educational materials. Standing on the shoulders of SDSS, the LSST EPO group wil...

The National Virtual Observatory (NVO) offers complete access to modern astronomy data, covering all instruments, at all wavelengths, at all times. The NVO's philosophy of EPO is to offer its technical services to existing EPO projects and products developed by the community, thereby enhancing already-successful materials by adding access to real d...

For more than four years, the SkyServer web site (http://skyserver.sdss.org) has made the complete database of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey available to the public, with lesson plans for teachers from elementary school through college. One of the most powerful features of the site is the ability to search the database, returning thousands or millio...

We have created the first K-12 education activity using data provided by the National Virtual Observatory (NVO). The activity, ``Adopt an Object,'' was suggested by Heidi Kaiter, a middle school science teacher from Concord, MA. It is designed for middle school students, but could be adapted for high school and Astro 101 students as well. Each gro...

This paper describes the Third Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), This release, containing data taken up through 2003 June, includes imaging data in five bands over 5282 deg2, photometric and astrometric catalogs of the 141 million objects detected in these imaging data, and spectra of 528,640 objects selected over 4188 deg2. The...

The National Virtual Observatory (NVO) is developing tools to enable astronomy data to be shared seamlessly across the Internet. The goal of the NVO is to allow anyone on the Internet to access all astronomy data ever measured, with any instrument, in any wavelength. The easy access to vast amounts of data offered by the NVO will revolutionize the...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will map 25% of the night sky down to 23rd magnitude, cataloging more than 100 million objects and taking spectra of over 1 million objects. All data from the SDSS will be publicly available on the Internet. These data include exact positions of stars, galaxies and quasars in the sky; magnitudes in five wavelengt...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has developed an extensive array of education and public outreach activities, focused on the SkyServer web site. SkyServer (http://skyserver.sdss.org) offers easy access to the complete dataset of the SDSS, nearly 90 million stars and galaxies. Although the SDSS is primarily an optical survey, we have developed a...

The Hands-On Universe (HOU) Project has developed powerful tools for students to undertake and model aspects of professional astronomy research. Building on a slowly evolving International Virtual Observatory and a network of small telescopes, plus other data bases of professional grade astronomy images, student can undertake many of the activities...

We have completed a new version of the SkyServer education web site featuring data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's Data Release 1 (DR1). DR1 includes data from over 2,000 square degrees of northern sky, with over 80 million stars and galaxies. SkyServer offers students and teachers easy access to complete data for all these objects. In additio...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will map 25% of the night sky from 9th to 23rd magnitude, cataloging more than 100 million objects and taking spectra of more than 1 million objects. All data from the SDSS will be publicly available on the Internet. SDSS data will give the public a unique opportunity to conduct astronomical research using the sa...

Since June 2001, the SkyServer website has offered the public unlimited access to the database of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). SkyServer includes a set of simple, intuitive tools for searching the database, including the Navigation Tool, a point-and-click interface to the sky. SkyServer also includes a set of educational projects that allow...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will map 25 night sky down to 23rd magnitude, cataloging more than 100 million objects and taking spectra of over 1 million objects. All SDSS data will be publicly available over the Internet, and the instant access to high-quality data that SDSS offers is already beginning to change astronomy. The same power of...

[1] Volcanic activity away from plate boundaries occurs in a variety of settings. Linear, age-progressive volcanic chains have been explained as the manifestation of fixed hot spots, possibly generated by plumes originating deep in the mantle. However, important examples of oceanic intraplate volcanism cannot be explained in this way, including sho...

The SkyServer provides Internet access to the public Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data for both astronomers and for science education. This paper describes the SkyServer goals and architecture. It also describes our experience operating the SkyServer on the Internet. The SDSS data is public and well-documented so it makes a good test platform fo...

The SkyServer provides Internet access to the public Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data for both astronomers and for science education. This paper describes the SkyServer goals and architecture. It also describes our experience operating the SkyServer on the Internet. The SDSS data is public and well-documented so it makes a good test platform fo...

The SkyServer provides Internet access to the public Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data for both astronomers and for science education. This paper describes the SkyServer goals and architecture. It also describes our experience operating the SkyServer on the Internet. The SDSS data is public and well-documented so it makes a good test platform fo...