The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope: From Software to Science

These slides were for at a seminar talk at NRC Herzberg in Victoria BC, and were used again the next day to facilitate a conversation about LSST with a smaller audience at the University of Victoria.

Abstract: The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will capture mosaics of the sky every few nights, each containing some 15 terabytes of data, beginning in 2022. It will ultimately create a multi-color high-resolution ten-year movie of the southern sky. As a result, the software being developed by the LSST Data Management team is as critical to the science as the telescope and the camera. Once LSST comes online, the software pipelines will produce catalogs of objects and a stream of alerts. I will present an overview of the status of LSST, discuss how we are building the alert production pipeline, and highlight opportunities for community involvement. All of our work is open source and freely available to the public.