SDSS plates

An odd subject, but this is one of the fibre plates from the sloan digital sky survey, that I got to play with. The coffee cup is intentional to give scale. Its quite a lump of aluminium with holes precision drilled to fit on the 2.5m SDSS telescope so that each hole overlays a galaxy and a spectroscopic fibre can gather data just on that target. Not everyones idea of fun, but I found it fascinating!