Proposal

I have always found astronomy to be very inspiring. I began my college career as an astronomy major. Over the past few months, I have grown increasingly attracted to the idea of studying astronomy again. After searching for interesting astronomy datasets, I found the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. I first learned about SDSS in my freshman year of college, but I forgot about it until very recently. SDSS has a unique search interface, as it primarily uses SQL commands to generate data.

For this project, I will be using SQL commands from SkyServer to construct my datasets. I may also reference an older dataset that I found on kaggle. Depending on what I can find on SkyServer, I would like to see if I can use the data to identify the classification of the stars found in SDSS. If there is not enough data available to organize stars by class, I will perform some exploratory analysis on the data I can find and I will provide plots and summary information, such as masses, population of galaxies versus stars in the survey, and averages for the different celestial bodies. If I can figure it out, I would like to see if I can develop a map using the 3D coordinates available.