Lyman-alpha forest with BOSS: progress report

Anze Slosar (Brookhaven National Lab)

Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey is an SDSS3 instrument aimed at constraining the properties of dark energy through baryonic acoustic oscillations using 1 million LRGs and 160,000 quasars. The experiment has started taking comissioning data in October 2010 and science data from December 2010 with data quality and observing efficiency steadily improving. I will discuss the Lyman-alpha part of the project and its challenges. These include a plethora of hard problems: selecting quasars from noisy photometry, automatically reducing thousands of spectra, identifying broad absorption line (BAL) quasars, locating damped Lyman-alpha (DLA) systems, and optimally measuring the two-point statistic of choice from millions of data-points and a truly nefarious window function.