Prospectives Visit 2023

Welcome to the Prospective Grad Student Visit Info Page!

During your visit, you’ll have the chance to meet with students, faculty, staff, and postdocs in the Berkeley Astronomy Department and take a tour of campus.

Overall Visit Schedule

Getting to know the Astronomy Department

Follow the links below to learn more about various aspects of department life. If you have questions, please email professor Wenbin Lu.

Virtual Tour of the Astronomy Department, UC Berkeley, and the Bay Area

Graduate Program

Department Climate

Research Opportunities

Outreach Opportunities

News & Events

New Telescope Time Domain survey headquartered at UC Berkeley!

The La Silla Schmidt Southern Survey (LS4, PI Peter Nugent -LBNL) will use the upgraded 20 square degree QUEST Camera on the ESO Schmidt Telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile to survey the dynamical transient sky in the southern hemisphere. This survey is designed to complement the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) being conducted at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in two ways. First, it will provide a higher cadence than LSST over several thousand square degrees of sky, allowing a more accurate characterisation of brighter and faster evolving transients to 21st magnitude. Second, it will open up a new phase-space for discovery when coupled with the LSST by probing the sky between 12–16th magnitude – a region where the Rubin Observatory saturates. Additionally, LS4 will also conduct focused searches for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources found by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA.

Projected start of science operations: 2023