Astronomy holds a special place in issues of K-12 science education and public outreach. Although the public views much of science as arcane at best and personally irrelevant at worst, virtually everyone, of every age, has looked up on a dark night and wondered about the origin, structure, and evolution of the cosmos. The questions which professional astronomers spend our lives attempting to answer are asked every time we visit a grade school classroom. Astronomy is probably the most accessible and photogenic of the sciences. Now that an ever-growing fraction of the general public is gaining access to the Internet in general, and the World Wide Web in particular, new opportunities are constantly opening up for interactions between the public and the research astronomer. The fact that the Space Telescope Science Institute WWW site is often found in surveys of the "top ten" sites visited by the public is ample evidence that both the teaching community and the interested layman have been quick to apply the new tools in an attempt to satisfy their astronomical curiosity.
Dissemination of the SDSS data to the widest possible audience has been an integral part of the project from the beginning. As discussed everywhere in the text of this proposal, our highest priority is to produce data of the highest quality. Not the least of the motivations for doing so is the expectation that the data will be used both by the professional astronomers and by the public in a wide variety of ways: as an educational tool in grade schools and colleges; by professional and amateur astronomers alike as a research tool; and as a window on the vast variety and beauty of the cosmos. We do not at this point in the project have a detailed plan for dissemination, but fully expect to be able to use the rich traditions and resources available already to the astronomical community; the professional and amateur societies, the planetarium and library communities, NASA's data centers and, of course, the internet.
Whether or not the current structure of the WWW and individual browsers running on small home and school computers is still the technology of choice near the completion point of the SDSS is not really relevant. Almost surely today's technology and data structures will be superseded within a few years. But the consumer demand for a mechanism that widely and simply searches the public universe of digital data, and then delivers it to the home or classroom in a largely transparent, machine-independent form, is now well-established, and can surely only grow with time.
The purpose of this section is not to present a plan for presentation of SDSS products to the K--12 or public community; such a task is most obviously a non-trivial one. Here we merely wish to point out the natural match of SDSS to the new digital capabilities appearing in the home and school. One of several traditional barriers to delivery of front-line scientific data to the public is the lack of homogeneity of available material. A grade school teacher who needs an image of an astronomical object, a high school teacher who wishes to demonstrate simple principles of spectroscopy with an actual stellar spectrum, and an amateur astronomer desiring a finding chart, must each turn to different sources, and often must identify a new source with each new need. The WWW and Internet finally present the technically-unsophisticated consumer with highly uniform search, fetch, display, and capture protocols. The SDSS will now present a totally homogeneous, comprehensive data source that can be probed with these flexible public tools.
The claimed thirst for homogeneous astronomical data banks is not illusory. Perhaps the closest currently-available public resource is the HST Guide Star Catalog (GSC). Despite the fact that those data reach only m~14 (~104 less sensitive than the SDSS images), are available in only one color (versus 5 for SDSS), and have only the crudest flux calibration, within literally months of public release the GSC was embraced by a startling variety of applications. Each issue of Sky and Telescope offers 4-5 different products which remarket the GSC for the general public.
We believe that the availability of the SDSS to the public, coming just as the
public has also gained access to remarkably sophisticated digital manipulation
tools in the home and classroom, will present wonderful new opportunities for
education and public interest in astronomy. As but a primitive example of how
homogeneous astronomical imaging and spectroscopy can be put to remarkably
sophisticated use by untrained students, we have constructed a WWW exercise
that allows high school and non-science university students to measure the
value of the Hubble constant ab initio, using digital images and
spectra. We invite the reader to visit the site at URL
Just as has been the case with the Hubble GSC, we believe that educators, hobbyists, and small businesses will seize on the SDSS and rapidly create a large and diverse variety of applications. As the SDSS project settles into routine data production the project's activities will turn increasingly towards the dissemination of the data.