![LSST](https://cdn2.webdamdb.com/md_0ipHDU0F8Pdq.png?1531519934)
Help some of the world's leading astronomers grasp the deepest properties of the universe.
The human eye has been the arbiter for the classification of astronomical sources in the night sky for hundreds of years. But a new facility -- the
[Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)](https://lsst-tvssc.github.io/)
-- is about to revolutionize the field, discovering 10 to 100 times more astronomical sources that vary in the night sky than we've ever known. Some of these sources will be completely unprecedented!
The Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-Series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC) asks Kagglers to help prepare to classify the data from this new survey. Competitors will classify astronomical sources that vary with time into different classes, scaling from a small training set to a very large test set of the type the LSST will discover.
More background information is available
[here](https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.00001)
.
Acknowledgements
PLAsTiCC is funded through LSST Corporation Grant Award # 2017-03 and administered by the University of Toronto.  Financial support for LSST comes from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Cooperative Agreement No. 1258333, the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515, and private funding raised by the LSST Corporation. The NSF-funded LSST Project Office for construction was established as an operating center under management of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA).  The DOE-funded effort to build the LSST camera is managed by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC).
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of science. NSF supports basic research and people to create knowledge that transforms the future.
[](http://www.nsf.gov)
[](http://www.aura-astronomy.org/)
[](http://science.energy.gov/)
[](https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/)
[](http://www.simonyifund.org/)
[](https://www.lsstcorporation.org/)
[](https://tvs.science.lsst.org/)
[](http://lsst-desc.org/)
[Photo Credit: M. Park/Inigo Films/LSST/AURA/NSF](https://gallery.lsst.org/bp/#/folder/4495689/63466005)
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.00001