SDSS DR9 release

It appears that the SDSS servers have begun serving SDSS DR9 data. SkyView accesses the SDSS through the Virtual Observatory Simple Image Access protocol (SIAP). In this protocol a user first requests a list of the images available in a region and a set of available URLs is returned.

As discussed in the previous article, the initial call for the list of URLs was working, but it appears that the URLs that were being returned have been a format they no longer supported. This may have been the case since September. The SDSS servers are now returning valid URLs but even though we are still querying using the URL for the DR8 SIAP service, the URLs being returned are for DR9 files. Thus images produced in the surveys labeled SDSSx in the SkyView interfaces are now DR9 although the documentation and internal FITS contents suggests that they are DR8. These will be updated early next week.

Access to the SDSSx surveys will likely be slower than normal until the SDSS cache is rebuilt using DR9 files.

Access to the SDSSDR7x surveys has been unaffected by these problems. It uses a different set of servers than the more recent releases.

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