• 2014 August 6 U of A News - UA Optics at Heart of Telescope Poised to Catch the Action in the Universe
• 2014 August 5 Science Magazine - Unusual new telescope gets green light
• 2014 August 4 Texas A&M - AURA's Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to Begin Construction, Thanks to National Science Foundation Funding Support
• 2014 August 4 UC Davis - Funds awarded to begin construction of Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
• 2014 July 21 BNL Newsroom - Instrumentation Division Nears Production Phase for LSST Camera Sensors
• 2014 June 27 Symmetry Magazine - Getting the jump on big data for LSST
• 2014 June 25 - Quality Magazine - CMS Announces William Gressler as Keynote Speaker for 2014 CMSC
• 2014 June 23 - Phys.org - UK astronomers debate involvement in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
• 2014 June 19 - Ball Aerospace - Ball Aerospace Selected to Build Lens Assembly for the LSST Camera

The LSST web team made its annual trip to DrupalConJune 2-6 with the maturing LSST website redesign project in mind. Drupal is a free, modular, and open source content management framework used by LSST for its websites. DrupalCon, the largest gathering of Drupal developers and users, afforded the LSST web team the opportunity to meet, brainstorm, and share lessons learned with the approximately 3,300 other Drupal users who attended. During the week in Austin, Texas, the team focused on sessions addressing “Frankensites,” accessibility, security, and best practices for upgrading to new Drupal versions.

August 13, 2014 – The LSST Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) contract has been signed by AURA and vendor GHESA Ingeniería y Tecnología, S.A (in consortium with ASTURFEITO, S.A.).

In March of 2014, UW astronomer and LSST Simulations Lead Andy Connolly was a featured speaker at the Vancouver, Canada, TED Symposium. He describes LSST when talking about “What’s the Next Window into our Universe?”. This talk is now featured online:

“Big Data is everywhere – even the skies. In an informative talk, astronomer Andrew Connolly shows how large amounts of data are being collected about our universe, recording it in its ever-changing moods. Just how do scientists capture so many images  at scale? It starts with a giant telescope…”

Now that federal construction on LSST has formally begun, the LSST Project has constituted a Science Advisory Committee (SAC). The committee’s job is to represent the wider scientific community (including the US astronomical community) and to advise LSST Project Director Steve Kahn as decisions are made throughout the LSST construction phase.

The LSST Hiring Campaign continues in full force as the project staffs up to meet the demands of the construction effort. Current positions, along with those filled and coming soon, are posted online at www.lsst.org/hiring. The five individuals below have joined the project recently as examples of Top Talent Working in a Team Environment that Inspires Excellence – welcome!

The LSST secondary mirror (M2) substrate has been safely relocated from Harvard University in Cambridge, MA to the Exelis facility in Rochester, NY. The mirror’s trek, which involved the use of a 50-ton internal bridge crane to load the mirror transport box onto a wide-load flatbed truck and a 70-ton external crane to offload it at destination, covered 604 miles in a little over a day. The truck and pilot vehicle departed Harvard at 1 pm on October 20 and arrived in Rochester at 3 pm on October 21. Subsequently, Exelis personnel have disassembled the transport box and thoroughly inspected the substrate.