There are two Web forms for retrieving DSS images.
The Simple DSS Form and the DSS Plate Finder.
The Simple DSS Form has been around nearly unchanged
since the DSS first opened in 1995, and will probably
stay that way (people seem to like it).
The DSS Plate Finder offers a more sophisticated interface
that shows all the plates from which an image can be extracted,
and can extract images from specific plates.
It can also plot catalogs onto schematic plate images,
and you can navigate over a plate
by pointing and clicking.
Image Formats
The Simple DSS Form can return images in FITS or GIF format. The
DSS Plate Finder can return FITS, GIF, JPEG, inline GIF (i.e., an
image inside a page), Postscript or PDF files. Note: GIF will be
going away in the near future, due to
legal problems
with the format. They will be replaced with PNG.
Image Sizes
The default size of DSS images is 15 x 15 arcminutes.
How big a file this makes depends on the survey and the file format
you've selected. FITS images for the First Generation surveys are
about 0.5 megabytes, while GIFs will typically be less than
half that size, and JPEGs smaller still, at a few tens of
kilobytes.
Search & Retrieval