LSST Overview & Science Data Products

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), currently under construction in Chile, will be the most comprehensive optical astronomy project ever undertaken.  Currently in the final stages of construction, it is designed to perform a "wide-fast-deep" survey over the entire visible sky at a 3-day cadence. The resulting hundreds of petabytes of imaging data for close to 40 billion objects will be used for scientific investigations ranging from the properties of near-Earth asteroids to characterizations of dark matter and dark energy. The volume, quality, and the real-time aspects of the LSST survey present significant challenges as well as exciting research opportunities.  In this talk I will give an overview and status of the LSST Project, and take an in-depth look at the primary deliverables of LSST, which include a nightly stream of public “alerts” to transient, variable, and moving objects, approximately annual Data Releases, and the LSST Science Platform (LSP), a collaborative research environment through which the community will perform large-scale analysis of the LSST data.