The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is the largest redshift survey conducted to
date, and the principal survey observations have all been conducted on the
dedicated SDSS 2.5m and 0.5m telescopes at Apache Point Observatory. While the
whole survey has many unique features, this article concentrates on a
description of the systems surrounding the dual fibre-input spectrographs that
obtain all the survey spectra and that are capable of recording 5,760
individual spectra per night on an industrial, consistent, mass-production
basis. It is hoped that the successes and lessons learned will prove
instructive for future large spectrographic surveys.Comment: Latex, 12 pages including 1 figure, uses spie.cls and spiebib.bst,
accepted for publication in Proc. SPIE vol. 5492, Ground Based Telescopes and
Instrumentation conference, Glasgow 2004 Jun