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Introduction
Those with ideas for future newsletter items should contact the LSST:UK Project Managers (George Beckett and Terry Sloanlusc_pm@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk), while everyone is encouraged to subscribe to the Rubin Observatory Digest for more general news from the US observatory team.
Call for Phase C DEV Work Packages
UK Contributions to DESC Operations
For LSST:UK work package 3.10 Joe Zuntz and James Perry are supporting the operations of DESC, the Dark Energy Science Collaboration. This is primarily software development, contributing to the pipelines that will run the cosmology analysis of Rubin data, and to the simulation tools that will stress-test the process. Our recent deliverables have covered both these areas.
On the simulation side, James has recently completed contributions to GalSim the galaxy image simulation library that is in wide use in the collaboration, and beyond. Developed as part of the Great 3 cosmic shear challenge, GalSim is one of the few codes with sufficient rendering accuracy for weak lensing analysis. James has added GalSim features to better model pixel boundaries on the telescope focal plane - the Brighter-Fatter effect means that the effective size of pixels are non-uniform in any given image, and these features given the library enough flexibility to model this at LSST accuracy.
On the analysis side, Joe has recently completed a deliverable that brings photometric redshifts into the primary DESC lensing and clustering pipeline. DESC will analyze what has come to be called "3x2pt": the combination of correlation functions in lensing with those in clustering. This analysis needs high quality (and, more importantly, well-characterised) photometric redshifts (PZs), which in DESC are generated via the RAIL package, which wraps a collection of community PZ codes. Joe has added modules to TXPipe, the DESC pipeline code, that link it to RAIL, completing a key step in the pipeline.
Appointment of the LSST:UK Education and Public Outreach Coordinator
We are delighted to announce that Chris Lintott has been appointed to be the LSST:UK Education and Public Outreach (EPO) Coordinator.
In addition to co-presenting The Sky at Night and being science lead of the Zooniverse project, Chris brings experience from a range of education and outreach activities, many conducted by the successful Access and Engagement Team in the Department of Physics at Oxford, which he leads. Chris has also been a member of the Rubin EPO programme’s advisory group for many years, so he is well acquainted with the EPO resources being developed by the Observatory in the US.
Chris is keen to solicit input from the many people within the LSST:UK Consortium who already undertake - or would like to undertake - education and outreach activities, as he begins to pull together an EPO plan for LSST:UK. He would particularly like to hear from Early Career Researchers who are keen to include an EPO strand in their career plans over the coming decade of LSST operations. Further details will follow in later Newsletters and separate messages to the lusc-announce list, but interested parties are welcome to contact him directly (chris.lintott@physics.ox.ac.uk).
Recent LSST:UK outputs
LSST:UK has recently produced the following technical reports.
Title | Author | Description |
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Chris Frohmaier and Mark Sullivan | The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and the 4m multi-object spectroscopic telescope (4MOST) commence survey operations in 2023. The Time-Domain Extragalactic Survey (TiDES) will follow-up LSST discovered transients to obtain spectroscopic measurements for tens-of-thousands of supernovae, galaxies, and active-galactic nuclei (AGN). This additional data will allow the mapping of the astrophysical diversity of cosmic explosions, measure the equation of state parameter for dark energy to unprecedented precision, and perform a comprehensive AGN reverberation mapping experiment. TiDES forms the basis of LSST:UK’s work-package WP3.3: Spectroscopic classification of transients. The strategies of both the LSST and 4MOST surveys are yet to be finalised and, with each acting independently, there exists the potential for a disjointed operation. TiDES operates downstream from LSST, spectroscopically following-up any transients it discovers. WP3.3 deliverable D3.3.2 (see below) presents the submitted ‘Cadence Note’ to the LSST Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC) with recommendations for a strategy suitable for TiDES science goals. This LSST:UK deliverable D3.3.1, presents an overview of the software developed to reach the conclusions presented in D3.3.2. Any future simulations produced by LSST and/or 4MOST can also be evaluated following the prescription presented in this. | |
Chris Frohmaier and Mark Sullivan | The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the Rubin Observatory will revolutionise understanding of the Universe by creating a decade long movie of the time-domain sky. Repeated and cadenced imaging alone, however, does not provide a complete picture of transient phenomena. This is where the 4MOST Time-Domain Extragalactic Legacy Survey (TiDES) adds crucial scientific value to LSST:UK investment in transient science. The success of TiDES will be determined, in part, by the survey design choices of LSST. Motivated by this, as part of LSST:UK WP3.3 we have authored a short document in response to an LSST request for a ‘Cadence Note’ from participating scientific communities. LSST provided us with several survey strategies from which we were able to build a simulation framework compatible with 4MOST’s own survey simulations. This TiDES cadence note answers seven key questions presented by the LSST Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC). In addressing each question, we consider several combinations of the LSST survey simulations and TiDES simulations to find the best performing solution for the TiDES science goals. As a result of this investigation we were able to produce recommendations to the SCOC for their consideration when finalising the LSST survey design. |
Forthcoming meetings of interest
Several meetings of potential interest have been scheduled for the coming months. As well as the winter DESC sprint week (in week beginning 25th October), the Rubin Observatory has announced an LSST Survey Strategy Workshop during 16th–17th November (which will be held online). More details are expected in the coming weeks via the DESC Confluence site and the Rubin Observatory Community Forum, respectively.
Note that the current list of forthcoming meeting is always available on the Relevant Meetings page. You may also wish to check information held on the LSST organisation website LSST-organised events and the LSST Corporation website
Announcements
If you have significant announcements that are directly relevant to LSST:UK and would like to share the announcement in a future newsletter, please contact the LSST:UK project managers.