The primary observational goals of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are to obtain CCD imaging of 10,000 deg ^ { 2 } of the north Galactic cap in five passbands , with a limiting magnitude in the r -band of 22.5 , to obtain spectroscopic redshifts of 10 ^ { 6 } galaxies and 10 ^ { 5 } quasars , and to obtain similar data for three \sim 200 deg ^ { 2 } stripes in the south Galactic cap , with repeated imaging to allow co-addition and variability studies in at least one of these stripes .
The resulting photometric and spectroscopic galaxy datasets allow one to map the large scale structure traced by optical galaxies over a wide range of scales to unprecedented precision .
Results relevant to the large scale structure of our Universe include : a flat model with a cosmological constant \Omega _ { \Lambda } = 0.7 provides a good description of the data ; the galaxy-galaxy correlation function shows departures from a power law which are statistically significant ; and galaxy clustering is a strong function of galaxy type .