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G.R. Knapp, Z. Ivezic, K Finlator, R Lupton, M. Strauss, J. Gunn (Princeton U.), X. Fan (IAS), P. Hall (Princeton U. and PUC), R. Kim (JHU), K Menou, V. Narayanan (Princeton U.), J. Loveday (U. Sussex), C.M. Rockosi (U. of Chicago), D. Schlegel, I. Strateva (Princeton U.), B. Yanny (Fermilab)
2MASS and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) provide catalogues of large areas of the sky at near-infrared and optical wavelengths with high sensitivity, dynamic range, and photometric and astrometric precision. Comparison of these catalogues over 200 square degrees of high-latitude sky matches about 200,000 sources, or 8% of the SDSS objects and 98% of the 2MASS objects. We present the optical and infrared color-color and color-magnitude diagrams for the matched sources and show that stars, galaxies and quasars can be cleanly separated even without morphological information using only the optical-infrared colors. We discuss the near infrared colors of asteroids, the colors and distribution of normal stars (cf. Finlator et al. 2000, AJ 120, 2615), the relative frequency of infrared-bright quasars, and the spectral energy distributions, clustering and luminosity function of nearby galaxies. We also compare the 2MASS and SDSS data for rare objects, including faint halo carbon stars, cataclysmic variables and low-luminosity stars and substars.
The SDSS is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the member institutions, NASA, the NSF, DoE, Monbusho and the Max Planck Society.