Crowdsourcing the Sky

Starting with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey over twenty years ago and continuing with Pan-STARRS-1, the Dark Energy Survey (DES), and most recently the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), large and systematic imaging surveys have established themselves as foundational to the progress of astronomy. They have opened new doors to our understanding of the Galaxy and the Universe more broadly and allowed more systematic studies with larger samples. The next big step forward will be the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will begin in a few years and will map the southern sky roughly every three days.