I worked with probably a dozen or so scientists and engineers who were building the SDSS telescope and the associated data analysis infrastructure (full disclosure: my role was very nearly entirely nothing compared to everyone else).

It's really a technological marvel, and some truly brilliant engineers and scientists were working on it. I'm intensely gratified that the survey has been such a smashing success; they all deserved it.

The part I was always most impressed with was they way they took the spectra. As mentioned in the article, the survey was twofold: the image survey over the vast swaths of the sky and somewhere around 2,000,000 spectra taken of distant objects.

Every single one of those spectra was taken by use of a fiber optic cable at the focus point of the telescope. They would take a metal plate, drill holes in it where the objects would appear, and plug the holes by hand with the cables: http://blog.sdss.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/twitter5.jpg

2 million times!