Penn State's Donald Schneider Looks Up to the SDSS

摘要

For centuries astronomers have used survey techniques to compile catalogs and inventories of celestial objects. The greatest observers in antiquity, Hipparchus and Ptolemy, produced the first catalogs. In the eighteenth century Messier compiled a list of 110 nebulae, which William Herschel expanded to several thousand, discovering Uranus serendipitously in the process.