The first specimen of the endangered cactus species, Sandillón (Eriocyce aurata), propagated in a University of La Serena laboratory as part of LSST’s environmental mitigation program, has been relocated to the greenhouse on Cerro Pachón. The relocation is a significant milestone in LSST’s effort to mitigate the effects of site excavation on the endangered species of Chile (LSST E-News, October 2011 Volume 4 Number 3).

The New York Times

Menlo Park, Calif. — A 3.2 billion-pixel digital camera designed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is now one step closer to reality. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope camera, which will capture the widest, fastest and deepest view of the night sky ever observed, has received “Critical Decision 1” approval by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to move into the next stage of the project.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will survey the entire visible sky every week, creating an unprecedented public archive of data – about 6 million gigabytes per year, the equivalent of shooting roughly 800,000 images with a regular eight-megapixel digital camera every night, but of much higher quality and scientific value. Its deep and frequent cosmic vistas will help answer critical questions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and aid studies of near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy and many other areas of astronomy and fundamental physics...

LSST will have a presence at the January 2012 meeting in Austin, starting with a half-day "splinter meeting" in the Austin Convention Center on Sunday afternoon, January 8th.  The ten coordinated posters in LSST session 156  will be up for one day, Monday, January 9^th.  An LSST booth in the exhibit hall will also be up throughout the meeting.

Poster Session 

156.02  Developments in Telescope & Site 
Victor Krabbendam¹ , William J. Gressler¹, John R. Andrew¹, Jeffrey D. Barr¹, Charles F. Claver^1,2, Joe DeVries¹, Edward Hileman¹, Ming Liang¹, Douglas R. Neill¹, Jacques Sebag¹, Srinivasan Chandrasekharan¹, Amali Vaz³, Oliver Wiecha¹, Bo Xin⁴ and the LSST Collaboration
¹National Optical Astronomy Observatory, ²Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, ³Harvard Univ., ⁴Purdue Univ.

156.04  Image Quality and Performance of the LSST Camera
D.K. Gilmore^ǂ, S. Kahn^ǂ, A. Rasmussen^ǂ, J. Singal^ǂ, and the LSST Camera Team^ǂ
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory / Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

156.06  Mapping the Stellar Content of the Milky Way with LSST
John Bochanski¹, Paul Thorman², Kevin Covey³, Knut Olsen⁴, Saurav Dhital⁵, Timothy C. Beers⁴, Pat Boeshaar², Phillip Cargile⁵, Márcio Catelan⁸, Seth Digel⁷, Puragra Guhathakurta⁸, Todd Henry⁹, Zeljko Ivezic¹⁰, Mario Juric¹¹, Jason Kalirai¹², J. Davy Kirkpatrick¹³, Peregrine M. McGehee¹³, Dante Minniti⁶, Anjum Mukadum¹⁰, Joshua Pepper⁵, Andrej Prsa¹⁴, Rok Roskar¹⁵, J. Allyn Smith¹⁶, Kevian Stassun⁵, Anthony Tyson² and the LSST Stellar Populations and Milky Way and Local Volume Science Collaborations
¹The Pennsylvania State Univ., ²Univ. of California - Davis, ³Lowell Observatory, ⁴National Optical Astronomy Observatory , ⁵Vanderbilt Univ., ⁶Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, ⁷KIPAC/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory,  ⁸UCO/Lick Observatory,

156.08  LSST Image Simulations
John R. Peterson¹, J. G. Jernigan², A. J. Connolly³, Z. Ahmad¹, J. Bankert¹, D. Bard⁴, C. Chang⁵, R. R. Gibson³, D. K. Gilmore⁴, E. Grace¹, M. Hannel¹, M. Hodge¹, L. Jones³, S. M. Kahn⁴, K. S. Krughoff³, S. Lorenz¹, S. Marshall⁴, S. Nagarajan¹, E. Peng¹, A. Rasmussen⁴, M. Shmakova⁴, N. Silvestri³, N. Todd¹, M. Young^1
1Purdue Univ., ²Univ. of California - Berkeley, ³Univ. of Washington, ⁴SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, ⁵Stanford Univ.

156.10  Evaluating LSST Schedule Realizations 
Srinivasan Chandrasekharan¹, Stephen T. Ridgway¹, Kem H. Cook², Cathy E. Petry³, R. Lynne Jones⁴, Simon K. Krughoff⁴, Zeljko Ivezic^4
1National Optical Astronomy Observatory, ²Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, ³Univ. of Arizona, ⁴Univ. of Washington