SciServer hosts more than two Petabytes of scientific data in a variety of disciplines, including astronomy and fluid mechanics. Datasets come in two types:

Public Data Volumes can be accessed from SciServer Compute by mounting them onto a new container at the time you create the container.

Databases can be accessed from SciServer Compute by querying them with commands from the SkyServer.CasJobs module. See the SciServer module API Documentation to learn how to use these commands.

The sections below describe each of the datasets available through SciServer. Click on one of the gray bubbles to the right of the dataset name to expand the section and see full information about that dataset.

SciServer makes a number of datasets directly available in SciServer Compute in the form of Public Data Volumes. To use these data volumes in your research or education activities, you will need to mount them to a virtual container at the time you create that container. See the instructions on How to create a new container to learn how to mount a Public Data Volume.

SciServer offers a number of catalog datasets in the form of online SQL databases. These databases can be queried directly through CasJobs. From the CasJobs Query page, select a dataset from the Context menu to choose what to query. Enter your query in the query box, then click Quick (to return results to your browser, limited to 90 seconds) or Submit (to write results into your MyDB.All these databases can also be queried from within SciServer Compute by using the SciServer API libraries. You do not have to mount anything to query these databases, and the libraries will work from within any container.

Simply import these libraries into your scripts, then make use of them. Information about how to use the libraries, and what commands are available, can be found in the SciServer API libraries documentation. Examples of how to query databases are available in the SciServer Example Notebooks.