Seminar

Expected to be on the sky by 2020, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope system will produce a 6-band (0.3-1.1 micron) wide-field deep survey of over 18,000 deg2 of the southern sky from 16th to 24th R mag per 30 sec visit and co-added depth 27th mag using an 8.4-meter ground-based telescope and a 3200 megapixel camera. Every patch of visible sky will be visited more than 800 times during the 10-year survey. This main survey will have revisit times from one hour to many days.  Ten percent of the survey will be in so-called “deep drilling fields” comprising continuous short exposures for ~1 hour nightly. The detailed cadence for both these surveys will be decided by the scientific collaborations worldwide. Combined with OIR spectroscopy and multi wavelength co-observing from radio to gamma-ray, the LSST survey offers the prospect of complete samples of traditionally rare transient objects over a wide range of timescales. Many of these transients will be caught on their way up, giving time for continuous monitoring by LCOGT during the rise to peak luminosity. Thirty terabytes of data will be produced nightly, and over one million alerts per night will be issued worldwide within 60 sec for objects that change in position or brightness.  Mining these data quickly and efficiently for the known knowns and the unknown unknowns presents unprecedented opportunities as well as object classification algorithm challenges.