The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE)

Understand

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), one of the programs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), has now completed its systematic, homogeneous spectroscopic survey sampling all major populations of the Milky Way.

• After a three year observing campaign on the Sloan 2.5-m Telescope, APOGEE has collected a half million high resolution (R~22,500), high S/N (>100), infrared (1.51-1.70 microns) spectra for 146,000 stars, with time series information via repeat visits to most of these stars.
• This paper describes the motivations for the survey and its overall design---hardware, field placement, target selection, operations---and gives an overview of these aspects as well as the data reduction, analysis and products.
• An index is also given to the complement of technical papers that describe various critical survey components in detail.