Overview of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project

LSST will be a large, wide-field groundbased telescope designed to obtain sequential images of the entire visible sky every few nights. The optical design involves a 3-mirror system with an 8.4 m primary, which feeds three refractive correcting elements inside a camera, providing a 10 square degree field of view sampled by a 3 Gpixel focal plane array. The total effective system throughput, AΩ = 319 m2 deg2, is nearly two orders of magnitude larger than that of any existing facility. The survey will yield contiguous overlapping imaging of 20,000 square degrees of sky in 6 optical bands covering the wavelength regime 320-1060 nm.