Astronomy Colloquium

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), the most comprehensive optical astronomical sky survey ever undertaken, will obtain panoramic images of the night sky every clear night for ten  years, starting this year. The resulting 60 petabytes of imaging data, essentially a digital color movie of the night sky, will include about 20 billion galaxies and a similar number of stars, and will be used for investigations ranging from cataloging potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids to fundamental physics such as characterization of dark matter and dark energy. I will review scientific goals behind this project, showcase its early data, and discuss remaining fine tuning of the Observatory before we formally start LSST.