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.
