Although the public views much of science as arcane at best and personally irrelevant at worst, virtually everyone, of every age, has looked up on a dark night and wondered about the origin, structure, and evolution of the cosmos. The questions which professional astronomers spend our lives attempting to answer are asked every time we visit a grade school classroom.
Astronomy is probably the most accessible and photogenic of the sciences.
Now that an ever-growing fraction of the general public is gaining access to the Internet in general, and the World Wide Web in particular, new opportunities are constantly opening up for interactions between the public and the research astronomer. Dissemination of the SDSS data to the widest possible audience has been an integral part of the project from the beginning. As discussed everywhere in the text of this proposal, our highest priority is to produce data of the highest quality. Whether or not the current structure of the WWW and individual browsers running on small home and school computers is still the technology of choice near the completion point of the SDSS is not really relevant. Almost surely today's technology and data structures will be superseded within a few years.