* Astronomy

Donations of $30 million to the Tucson-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project announced Thursday will be used to build the large core mirrors of the instrument, which will continuously scan and capture the night sky with the world's biggest digital camera.
The donations $20 million from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10 million from Microsoft founder Bill Gates represent some of the largest fundraising efforts to date for the $400 million telescope, which is expected to see "first light" atop the Cerro Pachón peak in northern Chile in 2014.

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Within a decade, a dream team of astronomers and computer geeks vows to bring a world-class observatory to every desktop, giving anyone with a PC access to remote galaxies and exploding supernovae.
The pledge is the result of a partnership announced last winter between a network of 19 national research institutions and engineers from the search-engine giant Google.
Their collective objective is to develop potent software to process the estimated 30 terabytes of astronomy imagery (think 12 billion five-megapixel photos) that will stream nightly from the newly built Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, slated to go online in 2013.

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Google today will announce its partnership with the University of Washington, the University of Arizona and others to create the world's largest database -- a moving picture of the universe.

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Observatory Sciences Ltd, a scientific software consultancy based in Cambridge, England, has completed the design study for the Observatory Control System software for the innovative new Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which is set to redefine the expectations of astronomers and scientists for
observational data.
The LSST is a US project headquartered in Arizona that is building a revolutionary new design of telescope that has a field of view 1000 times larger than that of existing large telescopes and a world-class light gathering capability. Every aspect of the project will be record breaking. The field of view, at ten square degrees, could accommodate fifty full moons. The LSST will image an area of the sky roughly fifty times that of the full moon every 15 seconds, opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid time scales: supernovae explosions which
can be seen halfway across the universe, nearby asteroids which might potentially strike Earth, and faint objects in the outer solar system, far beyond Pluto. Using the light-bending gravity of dark matter, the LSST will chart the history of the expansion of the universe and probe the mysterious nature of dark energy.
The LSST has become possible because we are now able to make large, deeply curved mirrors to an accuracy thought impossible just ten years ago. The telescope will use three mirrors, an 8.4m primary, a 3.4m secondary and a 5.0m tertiary, with the first and last fabricated as a single monolith. This three stage reflection means that LSST is actually so compact that it could sit inside current generation telescope domes.
It has recently been announced that Cerro Pachón, a 2,680m high mountain peak in northern Chile, has been selected as the future site for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. The mountain already hosts other large telescopes including the Gemini South 8m reflecting telescope on which Observatory Sciences consultants have worked in the past.

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