Retrieval Options

Retrieval Forms

There are two Web forms for retrieving DSS images. The Simple DSS Form and the . 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 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.

The Simple DSS Form can return images in FITS or GIF format. The can return FITS, GIF, JPEG, inline GIF (i.e., an image inside a page), Postscript or PDF files. GIFs may be replaced with PNG in the future.

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.