The Next Decade of US Ground Based Astronomy

On to the ground-based (i.e. NSF funded) recommendations (for large, new projects -- i.e., not including on-going investments in ALMA; there are a number of interesting medium scale projects recommended, but I probably won't have time to get to them). First priority was the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) -- a survey for a multi-color, multi-cadence survey of the sky with an 8m class telescope. As my colleague and LSST Project Scientist Zeljko Ivezic puts it, "LSST will make a movie of the sky," which, you have to admit, is pretty cool. When you think about discovery space in astronomy, the largest gains come when you move into new regimes. We've largely run out of new wavelength regimes, but the time-variable regime has not yet been explored in a large scale systematic way (although PanSTARRS and the Los Cumbres Observatory will certainly be making headway). In addition, the co-adds of ...