As a major component of the LAMOST Galactic surveys, the LAMOST Spectroscopic Survey of the Galactic Anti-centre (LSS-GAC) aims to survey a significant volume of the Galactic thin/thick discs and halo for a contiguous sky area of over 3,400 deg$^2$ c
entred on the Galactic anti-centre ($|b| leq 30^{circ}$, $150 leq l leq 210^{circ}$), and obtain $lambdalambda$3700 -- 9000 low resolution ($R sim 1,800$) spectra for a statistically complete sample of $sim 3$,M stars of all colours down to a limiting magnitued of $r$ $sim$ 17.8,mag (to 18.5,mag for limited fields). Together with Gaia, the LSS-GAC will yield a unique dataset to advance our understanding of the structure and assemblage history of the Galaxy, in particular its disk(s). In addition to the main survey, the LSS-GAC will also target hundreds of thousands objects in the vicinity fields of M,31 and M,33 and survey a significant fraction (over a million) of randomly selected very bright stars (VB; $r le 14$ mag) in the northern hemisphere. During the Pilot and the first year Regular Surveys of LAMOST, a total of 1,042,586 [750,867] spectra of a signal to noise ratio S/N(7450AA) $ge$ 10 [S/N(4650AA) $ge$ 10] have been collected. In this paper, we present a detailed description of the target selection algorithm, survey design, observations and the first data release of value-added catalogues (including radial velocities, effective temperatures, surface gravities, metallicities, values of interstellar extinction, distances, proper motions and orbital parameters) of the LSS-GAC.
With modern large scale spectroscopic surveys, such as the SDSS and LSS-GAC, Galactic astronomy has entered the era of millions of stellar spectra. Taking advantage of the huge spectroscopic database, we propose to use a standard pair technique to a)
Estimate multi-band extinction towards sightlines of millions of stars; b) Detect and measure the diffuse interstellar bands in hundreds of thousands SDSS and LAMOST low-resolution spectra; c) Search for extremely faint emission line nebulae in the Galaxy; and d) Perform photometric calibration for wide field imaging surveys. In this contribution, we present some results of applying this technique to the SDSS data, and report preliminary results from the LAMOST data.
