Joint Spectroscopic & Photometric Analyses of Low-Redshift Galaxies

The era of big data astronomy has changed how science is done. Astronomers now have access to impressively large spectroscopic and photometric datasets, which offer new opportunities for a broad range of discoveries. However, such increased data volume and complexity also introduces new challenges. Integrated science platforms such as the Astro Data Lab provide a unique opportunity to access and efficiently combine spectroscopic and photometric datasets for astronomical analysis and visualization. In this talk, I will showcase a new spectral access service that is over 200 times faster than the previous tools in retrieving spectra from large collections such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). I will show how to use the Data Lab to join the SDSS spectroscopic catalogs with the other available photometric datasets to study low-redshift galaxies. In addition, I will also demonstrate how to use Data Lab Jupyter notebooks to visualize images and spectra of these galaxies together. These Data Lab capabilities are going to be even more useful in the coming years with the advent of large surveys such as Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey.