June 21, 2018 – Last week’s SPIE meeting on Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation [2] in Austin, TX, gave LSST team members a chance to share exciting construction progress and learn from colleagues working on other projects and related technologies.  Over the six-day meeting, there were 20 LSST-authored posters, 16 oral presentations plus 2 invited talks, one on LSST Construction Status (V. Krabbendam) and another on the LSST Science Platform (F. Economou).  Deputy Director Beth Willman’s plenary talk on LSST Construction Progress and Scientific Opportunities is available here [3].  

[1]

Several LSST vendors had booths on the exhibit floor.  Ball Aerospace was showing a scale model of the LSST L1-L2 camera lens assembly and Teledyne e2v, maker of half the LSST sensors, brought one to show.  Other vendors included Asturfeito, builders of the Telescope 

Mount Assembly seen in this video [4], our Dome vendor EIE, as well as MagicDraw [5], creator of the system modeling tool used throughout the project.

At the time of SPIE 2020 in Japan, LSST will be experiencing engineering first light – providing lots of progress to share at this always exciting meeting!  

Left: Seen at the Teledyne e2v booth at SPIE2018: An LSST 4k by 4K sensor. 189 sensors will be tightly packed into the 63cm diameter LSST focal plane. Teledyne e2v/LSST/DOE/NSF