Monthly Meeting

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is about to transition into full operations, using one of the most powerful survey instruments ever built to continuously map a changing sky. It will begin the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a 10-year, high-resolution survey of the southern sky using the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope and its 3.2-gigapixel camera—the largest ever built for optical astronomy. By imaging the entire southern sky every few nights, it will create an unprecedented record of a changing universe.

The survey will capture everything from near-Earth asteroids and variable stars to supernovae and other transient events, generating a massive, continuous stream of data for discovery.

The presentation will introduce the observatory’s instrumentation, survey strategy, and key science goals, and will highlight how amateur astronomers can engage with LSST through public alert streams, citizen science projects, and future data releases.

About the Speaker
Douglas Tucker discovered his passion for astronomy early, inspired by the Apollo Moon landings and nurtured through years as an amateur observer. He studied physics in college—building his own 10-inch Dobsonian—before earning a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Yale University, where he researched galaxy clustering in the Las Campanas Redshift Survey.

After postdoctoral work at the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, he joined Fermilab, contributing to major sky surveys including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Dark Energy Survey. Since 2021, he has been involved with various aspects of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory project, on teams for Community Science, Validation & Verification and Data Curation.

This event is open to the public and free of charge.