In the CMB we see an imprint of a favored size scale in the universe that has manifested itself due to details of the birthing of our universe. That preferred size scale also is apparent at looking at another phenomenon, baryon acoustic oscilations. We can measure this preferred size scale as a standard ruler and use it to trace our universe's evolutionary history. Details of this will give us insight into Dark Energy, one of science's greatest mysteries.

BOSS will be using 2 main sources for its baryon acoustic oscillation measurement: luminous red galaxies (LRGs) and quasars (QSOs). The LRG portion of the survey will use the positions of LRGs over 10, 000 square degrees to construct a power spectrum of their spatial distribution. By using QSOs as distant backlights for the intervening dust (through Lyman alpha absorption), we can use a single object to map the matter along an entire line of sight. This allows us to probe deeper and more efficiently.

Quasars have a locus in color space similar anaologous to that of stars. Unfortunately around redshifts of 2.3 the QSO locus and the stellar locus intersect in the Sloan 5-filter color space. This is a crucial redshift range because the features Lyman alpha forest don't come into the optical until redshifts around 2.2. The number densities of these objects per degree squared on the sky also drops off as we get to larger and larger redshifts. This means that we must determine effective ways of efficiently targetting these Quasars. This was my primary goal during my last Summer's work with David Schlegel at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Myself and several others working on this problem have been developing and synthesizing different techniques to get the best possible results. As of right now we are awaiting spectra from the MMT telescope which will allow us to continue our work in this field.

The SDSS spectra that are in the public data release are actually co-added spectra from at least 3 exposures that are at least 15 minutes apart. My first research project was to look into these individual exposures of white dwarfs and attempt to find evidence for binary companions to these objects that would manifest itself as an accelaration of the object (or in terms of what I was looking for) a change in the redshift of the object. I found several WD+M painrs and upon investigating their photometry serendipitously found that one was an eclipsing binary. After this discovery I embarked on a systematic search of the repeatedly imaged equatorial region of the SDSS known as stripe 82 in an attempt to find more eclipsing systems. I have currently found 5. These objects are of interest because they may be progenitors of Supernova Type Ia, which are a fundamental tool in astronomy that need further study and examination.