We present and describe a catalog of galaxy photometric redshifts (photo-zs) for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Coadd Data. We use the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) technique to calculate photo-zs and the Nearest Neighbor Error (NNE) method to
estimate photo-z errors for $sim$ 13 million objects classified as galaxies in the coadd with $r < 24.5$. The photo-z and photo-z error estimators are trained and validated on a sample of $sim 83,000$ galaxies that have SDSS photometry and spectroscopic redshifts measured by the SDSS Data Release 7 (DR7), the Canadian Network for Observational Cosmology Field Galaxy Survey (CNOC2), the Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe Data Release 3(DEEP2 DR3), the VIsible imaging Multi-Object Spectrograph - Very Large Telescope Deep Survey (VVDS) and the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey. For the best ANN methods we have tried, we find that 68% of the galaxies in the validation set have a photo-z error smaller than $sigma_{68} =0.031$. After presenting our results and quality tests, we provide a short guide for users accessing the public data.
Cosmic acceleration is investigated through a kink-like expression for the deceleration parameter (q). The new parametrization depends on the initial (q_i) and final (q_f) values of q, on the redshift of the transition from deceleration to accelerati
on (z_{t}) and the width of such transition (tau). We show that although supernovae (SN) observations (Gold182 and SNLS data samples) indicate, at high confidence, that a transition occurred in the past (z_{t}>0) they do not, by themselves, impose strong constraints on the maximum value of z_{t}. However, when we combine SN with the measurements of the ratio between the comoving distance to the last scattering surface and the SDSS+2dfGRS BAO distance scale (S_{k}/D_{v}) we obtain, at 95.4% confidence level, z_{t}=0.84+{0.17}-{0.13} and tau =0.51-{0.17}+{0.23} for (S_{k}/D_{v}+Gold182), and z_{t}=0.88-{0.10}+{0.12} and tau =0.35-{0.10}+{0.12} for (S_{k}/D_{v} + SNLS), assuming q_i=0.5 and q_f=-1. We also analyze the general case, q_fin(-infty,0) finding the constraints that the combined tests (S_{k}/D_{v} + SNLS) impose on the present value of the deceleration parameter (q_0).
