SDSS Imaging Pipelines

The SDSS project has taken 5-band data covering approximately 3000 deg2, or 4Tby of data. This has been processed through a set of image-processing pipelines, and the resulting catalogues of about 100 million objects have been used for a number of scientific projects. We discuss our software infrastructure, and outline the architecture of the SDSS image processing pipelines. In order to process this volume of data the pipelines have to be robust and reasonably fast; because we have been interested in looking for rare objects, the number of outliers due to deficiencies in the data and bugs in the software must be small. We have found that writing the codes has been one of the harder and more expensive aspects of the entire survey.

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