Everything we'd like to do with LSST data, but we don't know (yet) how

Abstract

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), the next-generation optical imaging survey sited at Cerro Pachon in Chile, will provide an unprecedented database of astronomical measurements. The LSST design, with an 8.4m (6.7m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 sq. deg. field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera, will allow about 10,000 sq. deg. of sky to be covered twice per night, every three to four nights on average, with typical 5-sigma depth for point sources of $r$=24.5 (AB). With over 800 observations in $ugrizy$ bands over a 10-year period, these data will enable a deep stack reaching $r$=27.5 (about 5 magnitudes deeper than SDSS) and faint time-domain astronomy. The measured properties of newly discovered and known astrometric and photometric transients will be publicly reported within 60 sec after observation. The vast database of about 30 trillion observations of 40 billion objects will be mined for the unexpected and used for precision experiments in astrophysics. In addition to a brief introduction to LSST, we discuss a number of astro-statistical challenges that need to be overcome to extract maximum information and science results from LSST dataset.

10 pages, 2 figures, IAU Symposium 325 "Astroinformatics"

References in corpus (5)

• The Milky Way Tomography with SDSS: II. Stellar Metallicity
• Confirmation of general relativity on large scales from weak lensing and galaxy velocities
• Calibrating Redshift Distributions Beyond Spectroscopic Limits with Cross-Correlations
• Impact of Atmospheric Chromatic Effects on Weak Lensing Measurements
• The Variable Sky of Deep Synoptic Surveys

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Photometry of high-redshift blended galaxies using deep learning
• Scalable End-to-end Recurrent Neural Network for Variable star classification
• L dwarfs detection from SDSS images using improved Faster R-CNN
• Astronomical observations: a guide for allied researchers
• Observing the very low-surface brightness dwarfs in a deep field in the VIRGO cluster: constraints on Dark Matter scenarios
• Fast in-database cross-matching of high-cadence, high-density source lists with an up-to-date sky model