Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
Rendering of completed LSST
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| Organisation | LSST Corporation |
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| Location(s) | El Peñón, Chile |
| Coordinates | 30°14′40.7″S 70°44′57.9″W / 30.244639°S 70.749417°WCoordinates: 30°14′40.7″S 70°44′57.9″W / 30.244639°S 70.749417°W |
| Altitude | 2,663 m (8,737 ft), top of pier |
| Wavelength | 320–1060 nm |
| Built | 2014–2019 (planned) |
| First light | 2019 |
| Telescope style | Three-mirror anastigmat, Paul-Baker / Mersenne-Schmidt wide-angle |
| Diameter | 8.417 m (27.6 ft) physical 8.360 m (27.4 ft) optical 5.116 m (16.8 ft) inner |
| Secondary diameter | 3.420 m (1.800 m inner) |
| Tertiary diameter | 5.016 m (1.100 m inner) |
| Angular resolution | 0.7″ median seeing limit 0.2″ pixel size |
| Collecting area | 35 square metres (376.7 sq ft) |
| Focal length | 10.31 m (f/1.23) overall 9.9175 m (f/1.186) primary |
| Mounting | altitude/azimuth |
| Website | www |
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The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a wide-field survey reflecting telescope with an 8.4-meter primary mirror, currently under construction, that will photograph the entire available sky every few nights. The telescope uses a novel 3-mirror design which delivers sharp images over a very wide 3.5-degree diameter field of view, feeding a 3.2-gigapixel CCD imaging camera, the largest digital camera ever constructed.
The telescope will be located on the El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón, a 2,682-meter-high mountain in Coquimbo Region, in northern Chile, alongside the existing Gemini South and Southern Astrophysical Research Telescopes.
The LSST was the top-ranked large ground-based project in the 2010 Astrophysics Decadal Survey. The project officially began construction 1 August 2014 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) authorized the FY2014 portion ($27.5 million) of its construction budget. The ceremonial laying of the first stone was performed on 14 April 2015. Site construction began on April 14, 2015, with engineering first light anticipated in 2019, science first light in 2021, and full operations for a ten-year survey commencing in January 2022.
The LSST design is unique among large telescopes (8 m-class primary mirrors) in having a very wide field of view: 3.5 degrees in diameter, or 9.6 square degrees. For comparison, both the Sun and the Moon, as seen from Earth, are 0.5 degrees across, or 0.2 square degrees. Combined with its large aperture (and thus light-collecting ability), this will give it a spectacularly large etendue of 319 m2∙degree2.
To achieve this very wide, undistorted field of view requires three mirrors, rather than the two used by most existing large telescopes: the primary mirror (M1) is 8.4 metres (28 ft) in diameter, the secondary mirror (M2) is 3.4 metres (11.2 ft) in diameter (and will be the largest convex mirror ever made), and the tertiary mirror (M3), located in a large hole in the primary, is 5.0 metres (16 ft) in diameter. The large hole reduces the primary mirror's light collecting area to 35 square metres (376.7 sq ft), equivalent to a 6.68-metre-diameter (21.9 ft) circle. (Multiplying this by the field of view produces an etendue of 336 m2∙degree2; the actual figure is reduced by vignetting.)
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Wikipedia