LSST and Google - a partnership made in heaven

A comment downstream informs us that Google is already a partner in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope!

Way cool.

The LSST is a planned 8 metre class telescope designed for a very wide field of view, and will to a "synoptic" survey of the sky (or the little over half the sky it can reach, if only one is built).
Survey would cover the whole sky about twice per week, to a depth of about 24th magnitude (that's pretty faint), using a 3Giga pixel camera.
It would look for variability, including supernovae, near Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, novae, variable star and galactic nuclei. It is an ambitious high priority project. It may give a handle on Dark Energy (everything being proposed now for extragalactic observing has a Dark Energy sub-plot) and will certainly provide serendipitous discoveries.

The LSST database will be very valuable, and large, searching it will take essentially all the resources that can be thrown at it.
I see google's interest. Clever people. When they registered universe.google.com they were just doing some prep work.

I look forward to it.