LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

Calibration of LSST Instrumental and Atmospheric Photometric Passbands

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will continuously image the entire sky visible from Cerro Pachon in northern Chile every 3-4 nights throughout the year. The LSST will provide data for a broad range of science investigations that require better than 1% photometric precision across the sky (repeatability and uniformity) and a similar accuracy of measured broadband color. The fast and persistent cadence of the LSST survey will significantly improve the temporal sampling rate with which celestial events and motions are tracked. To achieve these goals, and to optimally utilize the observing calendar, it will be necessary to obtain excellent photometric calibration of data taken over a wide range of observing conditions - even those not normally considered 'photometric'. To achieve this it will be necessary to routinely and accurately measure the full optical passband that includes the atmosphere as well as the instrumental telescope and camera system. The LSST mountain facility will include a new monochromatic dome illumination projector system to measure the detailed wavelength dependence of the instrumental passband for each channel in the system. The facility will also include an auxiliary spectroscopic telescope dedicated to measurement of atmospheric transparency at all locations in the sky during LSST observing. In this paper, we describe these systems and present laboratory and observational data that illustrate their performance