A small slice of the Milky Way disk in SDSS
  The present-day state of the Milky Way disk can tell us much about the
history of our Galaxy and provide insights into its formation. We have
constructed a high-precision catalogue of disk stars using data from the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and use these stars to probe the heating history as
well as investigating the detailed phase-space distribution. We also show how
this sample can be used to probe the global properties of the Milky Way disk,
employing the Jeans equations to provide a simple model of the potential close
to the disk. Our model is in excellent agreement with others in the literature
and provides an indication that the disk, rather than the halo, dominates the
circular speed at the solar neighborhood. The work presented in these
proceedings has been published as "Slicing and dicing the Milky Way disc in
SDSS" (Smith et al. 2012).
