Large-scale astronomical spectroscopic surveys

Optical astronomy has been developing very fast in the 21 century. There are many large-scale astronomical sky surveys, such as 2dF, 6dF, RAVE, SDSS, LAMOST and Gaia. The progress of astronomical spectroscopic survey in the world is reviewed. In this paper the SDSS in USA and LAMOST in China are introduced as two examples. LAMOST is a special reflecting Schmidt telescope. LAMOST breaks through the bottleneck of the large scale spectroscopic survey observation with both large aperture and wide field of view. LAMOST is the telescope of the highest spectrum acquiring rate. From October 2011 to June 2013, LAMOST has obtained more than 2 million spectra of celestial objects. There are 1.7 million spectra of stars, in which the stellar parameters of more than 1 million stars are obtained.