Welcome to community.lsst.org

community.lsst.org is a place for the astronomy community to discuss the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope’s development and get help with using LSST’s software today.

What’s here

Discussions are sorted into categories:

  • Support for community-driven help with the LSST software stack.
  • Announcements for official notifications from LSST, such as software releases, or events.
  • Science for public discussions about LSST-related science.
  • Science Collaborations for discussions within LSST Science Collaborations (collaboration membership is required to participate). Sub-categories are also available for individual collaborations.
  • Meta for discussion related to this forum, such as how to format content or to make feature requests.

You can also join Project staff in discussing LSST’s construction in these categories:

  • Data Management for general Data Management and LSST Stack development discussions.
  • Simulations for discussing simulations and the observing strategy planning (including the Metric Analysis Framework, MAF).
  • EPO for discussions about Education and Public Outreach.
  • Camera for discussions about LSST’s camera development.

A full list of categories is available at https://community.lsst.org/categories.

Next steps

  1. Create your account if you haven’t yet with the blue button at the top-right.

    You can create a username/password specifically for this site, or just use your GitHub credentials.

    Make sure your username is easy to read and type. Forum members can mention each other in posts like on Twitter. For example, ‘Hi @jsick!’.

  2. Review our community guidelines, terms of service and privacy policy.

    This is a welcoming, inclusive community. The FAQ/Guidelines are very useful to learn how this forum and community works. In particular, if you see a post that you feel breaches the spirit of this community, flag it. Flags will alert moderators to the issue and enough flags will automatically hide the post for further review. LSST and moderators don’t review posts in advance.

    All content posted to community.lsst.org is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

  3. Participate

    Initially you’ll have limited powers with your account, but as you read and post to the forum, you’ll gradually be able to do things like

    • invite colleagues to join, even with specific topic threads,
    • send private messages directly to other forum members,
    • edit wiki posts,
    • include images and unlimited links in posts,
    • flag posts,
    • and even help maintain the forum by re-categorizing and renaming posts.

    Learn more about Discourse platform’s trust system.

  4. Getting help with using community.lsst.org

    We’ve put together a series of help documents to get you started. Browse the ‘forum-howto’ tag. Useful topics include:

    Feel free to ask a question in the Meta category if you still need help.


For more information about LSST, you can visit the LSST homepage.

To learn how to engage with LSST as an astronomer, visit our page Participate page.