The Eighth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Data from SDSS-III

SDSS-III collaboration, Hiroaki Aihara, Carlos Allende Prieto, Deokkeun An, Scott F. Anderson, Éric Aubourg, Eduardo Balbinot, Timothy C. Beers, Andreas A. Berlind, Steven J. Bickerton, Dmitry Bizyaev, Michael R. Blanton, John J. Bochanski, Adam S. Bolton, Jo Bovy, W. N. Brandt, J. Brinkmann, Peter J. Brown, Joel R. Brownstein, Nicolas G. Busca, Heather Campbell, Michael A. Carr, Yanmei Chen, Cristina Chiappini, Johan Comparat, Natalia Connolly, Marina Cortes, Rupert A. C. Croft, Antonio J. Cuesta, Luiz N. da Costa, James R. A. Davenport, Kyle Dawson, Saurav Dhital, Anne Ealet, Garrett L. Ebelke, Edward M. Edmondson, Daniel J. Eisenstein, Stephanie Escoffier, Massimiliano Esposito, Michael L. Evans, Xiaohui Fan, Bruno Femení a Castellá, Andreu Font-Ribera, Peter M. Frinchaboy, Jian Ge, Bruce A. Gillespie, G. Gilmore, Jonay I. González Hernández, J. Richard Gott, Andrew Gould, Eva K. Grebel, James E. Gunn, Jean-Christophe Hamilton, Paul Harding, David W. Harris, Suzanne L. Hawley, Frederick R. Hearty, Shirley Ho, David W. Hogg, Jon A. Holtzman, Klaus Honscheid, Naohisa Inada, Inese I. Ivans, Linhua Jiang, Jennifer A. Johnson, Cathy Jordan, Wendell P. Jordan, Eyal A. Kazin, David Kirkby, Mark A. Klaene, G. R. Knapp, Jean-Paul Kneib, C. S. Kochanek, Lars Koesterke, Juna A. Kollmeier, Richard G. Kron, Hubert Lampeitl, Dustin Lang, Jean-Marc Le Goff, Young Sun Lee, Yen-Ting Lin, Daniel C. Long, Craig P. Loomis, Sara Lucatello, Britt Lundgren, Robert H. Lupton, Zhibo Ma, Nicholas MacDonald, Suvrath Mahadevan, Marcio A. G. Maia, Martin Makler, Elena Malanushenko, Viktor Malanushenko, Rachel Mandelbaum, Claudia Maraston, Daniel Margala, Karen L. Masters, Cameron K. McBride, Peregrine M. McGehee, Ian D. McGreer, Brice Ménard, Jordi Miralda-Escudé, Heather L. Morrison, F. Mullally, Demitri Muna, Jeffrey A. Munn, Hitoshi Murayama, Adam D. Myers, Tracy Naugle, Angelo Fausti Neto, Duy Cuong Nguyen, Robert C. Nichol, Robert W. O'Connell, Ricardo L. C. Ogando, Matthew D. Olmstead, Daniel J. Oravetz, Nikhil Padmanabhan, Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille, Kaike Pan, Parul Pandey, Isabelle Pâris, Will J. Percival, Patrick Petitjean, Robert Pfaffenberger, Janine Pforr, Stefanie Phleps, Christophe Pichon, Matthew M. Pieri, Francisco Prada, Adrian M. Price-Whelan, M. Jordan Raddick, Beatriz H. F. Ramos, Céline Reylé, James Rich, Gordon T. Richards, Hans-Walter Rix, Annie C. Robin, Helio J. Rocha-Pinto, Constance M. Rockosi, Natalie A. Roe, Emmanuel Rollinde, Ashley J. Ross, Nicholas P. Ross, Bruno M. Rossetto, Ariel G. Sánchez, Conor Sayres, David J. Schlegel, Katharine J. Schlesinger, Sarah J. Schmidt, Donald P. Schneider, Erin Sheldon, Yiping Shu, Jennifer Simmerer, Audrey E. Simmons, Thirupathi Sivarani, Stephanie A. Snedden, Jennifer S. Sobeck, Matthias Steinmetz, Michael A. Strauss, Alexander S. Szalay, Masayuki Tanaka, Aniruddha R. Thakar, Daniel Thomas, Jeremy L. Tinker, Benjamin M. Tofflemire, Rita Tojeiro, Christy A. Tremonti, Jan Vandenberg, M. Vargas Magaña, Licia Verde, Nicole P. Vogt, David A. Wake, Ji Wang, Benjamin A. Weaver, David H. Weinberg, Martin White, Simon D. M. White, Brian Yanny, Naoki Yasuda, Christophe Yeche, Idit Zehavi

Published 2011-01-08, updated 2011-02-25Version 2

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 describes the first data release of SDSS-III (and the eighth counting from the beginning of the SDSS). The release includes five-band imaging of roughly 5200 deg^2 in the Southern Galactic Cap, bringing the total footprint of the SDSS imaging to 14,555 deg^2, or over a third of the Celestial Sphere. All the imaging data have been reprocessed with an improved sky-subtraction algorithm and a final, self-consistent photometric recalibration and flat-field determination. This release also includes all data from the second phase of the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Evolution (SEGUE-2), consisting of spectroscopy of approximately 118,000 stars at both high and low Galactic latitudes. All the more than half a million stellar spectra obtained with the SDSS spectrograph have been reprocessed through an improved stellar parameters pipeline, which has better determination of metallicity for high metallicity stars.