Exploring Citizen Science Use Cases with the Lasair transient alert broker

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Astronomy will enter the petabyte era with the first light of the 8.2-m Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Equipped with a wide-field camera covering an area 40 times the size of the full Moon, LSST will effectively make the largest movie of the night sky. Every three nights LSST will survey the entire visible night sky. This enables an unprecedented study of cosmic and Solar System transients: variable stars, moving Solar System objects, Solar System bodies exhibiting cometary activity, supernovae, and other astrophysical explosions. LSST will identify ten million transient/variable sources per night Using present day LSST precursor datasets, we will explore how we can maximise LSST transient science by combining citizen science/crowd-sourcing and automated routines to better search for the astronomical needle in a haystack. In particular, we will focus on how the Lasair alert stream broker concept can be leveraged with the Zooniverse platform, which hosts the largest collection of people-powered projects in the world, to efficiently and effectively sift through the LSST alert stream in real time to identify transient sources worthy of rapid follow-up with other ground-based and space-based telescopes.