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We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the solar system, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a large, wide-field ground-based system designed to obtain repeated images covering the sky visible from Cerro Pachón in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg 2 field of view, a 3.2-gigapixel camera, and six filters (ugrizy) covering the wavelength range 320-1050 nm. The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. About 90% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode that will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg 2 region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 yr of operations and will yield a co-added map to r∼27.5. These data will result in databases including about 32 trillion observations of 20 billion galaxies and a similar number of stars, and they will serve the majority of the primary science programs. The remaining 10% of the observing time will be allocated to special projects such as Very Deep and Very Fast time domain surveys, whose details are currently under discussion. We illustrate how the LSST science drivers led to these choices of system parameters, and we describe the expected data products and their characteristics.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most brilliant objects in the Universe but efforts to estimate the total energy released in the explosion -- a crucial physical quantity -- have been stymied by their unknown geometry: spheres or cones. We report on a comprehensive analysis of GRB afterglows and derive their conical opening angles. We find that the gamma-ray energy release, corrected for geometry, is narrowly clustered around 5x10**50 erg. We draw three conclusions. First, the central engines of GRBs release energies that are comparable to ordinary supernovae, suggesting a connection. Second, the wide variation in fluence and luminosity of GRBs is due entirely to a distribution of opening angles. Third, only a small fraction of GRBs are visible to a given observer and the true GRB rate is at least a factor of 500 times larger than the observed rate.Comment: Nature, submitte

The Pan-STARRS1 survey is collecting multi-epoch, multi-color observations of the sky north of declination −30 • to unprecedented depths. These data are being photometrically and astrometrically calibrated and will serve as a reference for many other purposes. In this paper we present our determination of the Pan-STARRS1 photometric system: g P1 , r P1 , i P1 , z P1 , y P1 , and w P1 . The Pan-STARRS1 photometric system is fundamentally based on the HST Calspec spectrophotometric observations, which in turn are fundamentally based on models of white dwarf atmospheres. We define the Pan-STARRS1 magnitude system, and describe in detail our measurement of the system passbands, including both the instrumental sensitivity and atmospheric transmission functions. Byproducts, including transformations to other photometric systems, galactic extinction, and stellar locus are also provided. We close with a discussion of remaining systematic errors.1 The classic observer's "magnitude" system, originally defined by Pogson to crudely coincide with ancient Greek classification of star brightness, is slowly withering in favor of flux densities reported in units of Jy, but we caution that such flux densities typically are ambiguous for extended bandpasses, and we strongly recommend that non-monochromatic "flux densities" conform to this definition of the AB system: A nonmonochromatic "flux density" is the ratio of detector response to SED relative to constant f ν .

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