Surveying the Sky with the LSST: Software as the instrument of the Next Decade

The development of a new generation of telescopes, large-scale detectors, and computational facilities has led to an era where it is now possible for deep optical surveys to survey a large fraction of the visible sky. One of the largest of these surveys, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), will comprise an 8.4 m primary mirror with a 9.6 square degree field-of-view and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera and begin operations at the end of this decade. Over the ten years of its operation, the LSST will survey half of the sky in six optical colors, discovering 37 billion stars and galaxies and detecting about 10 million variable or transient sources every night. In this talk I will describe the status of the LSST, its potential for studying the nature of dark matter and dark energy, for measuring the properties of our Galaxy, and for creating a census of our Solar System, and describe how advances in computational techniques for analyzing massive data streams might enable the LSST to meet its science objectives.Invited plenary talk at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference