Big Software for Big Data: Scaling Up Photometry for LSST (Abstract)

Volume 45 number 1 (2017)

Meredith Rawls

Department of Astronomy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195; meredith.rawls@gmail.com

Abstract

(Abstract only) The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will capture mosaics of the sky every few nights, each containing more data than your computer’s hard drive can store. As a result, the software to process these images is as critical to the science as the telescope and the camera. I discuss the algorithms and software being developed by the LSST Data Management team to handle such a large volume of data. All of our work is open source and available to the community. Once LSST comes online, our software will produce catalogs of objects and a stream of alerts. These will bring exciting new opportunities for follow-up observations and collaborations with LSST scientists.