Introduction

Lasair team members recognised by the Institute of Physics

Eleanor O'Kane

ComCam captures the sky for the first time

Rubin-Euclid Derived Data Products update

The Rubin-Euclid Derived Data Products (DDPs) are high-level data products to be generated by combining the separate Rubin and Euclid survey data. A joint working group established by the two projects defined an extensive and diverse set of DDPs that are summarised in the Rubin-Euclid Derived Data Products report (Guy et al. 2022).

A joint Rubin/Euclid implementation working group has now been established to steer the community in generating the DDPs. To engage with the Rubin-Euclid DDP effort you can join the community forum at https://community.rubin-euclid-ddp.org/.

An initial workshop was held in September to report on relevant efforts in DDP production. Slides and recordings can be accessed at the link https://community.rubin-euclid-ddp.org/t/ddp-community-workshop-meetings-sept-23-26-2024/748

Manda Banerji

Remembering Professor Ian Shipsey FRS

I first encountered Ian Shipsey on a BlueJeans call of the LSST Sensor Anomalies Working Group (SAWG) in 2015, at which I gave an early presentation about some work I’d done during my PhD on the brighter-fatter effect. He asked a rather deep technical question to which my only answer was that I’d have to “get back to him”.

A few months later, Ian arrived on a tour of our lab at The Open University. He was there on other business but, in his typical enthusiastic fashion, insisted on chatting to and quizzing every PhD student in the lab working on their various projects at length, from X-ray astronomy applications to sensors for ground-based optical telescopes to sounding rockets to radiation damage testing for ESA missions including Euclid, resulting in the whole tour ending about 40 minutes after it was scheduled to.

Those who knew Ian will be familiar with the phenomenon. About a year later I was finally able to “get back to him” on the brighter-fatter effect when I was hired as the first postdoc in the newly formed OPMD research group and, in the more than eight years working with him since, I was continuously struck not only by his personal kindness and generosity, but his seemingly boundless amounts of energy, enthusiasm and optimism for experimental physics in all its forms, in particular for instrumentation.

A long and storied career

Whenever he would give a talk to a more general physicist audience, there would always be a slide listing many of the deep mysteries of the universe that we still don’t understand, from Dark Energy to the neutrino mass hierarchy, and he would state in no uncertain terms: “there’s never been a better time to be in experimental particle physics / astrophysics” – deleting as appropriate for the particular audience or, sometimes, simply saying “physics”. Being much more focused on low-level-details myself, I was often sceptical of this claim in particular because it was somewhat at odds with remarks made by many of his fellow senior professors, but one couldn’t help but be somewhat convinced by the power and conviction of his delivery alone. What we strongly shared was the belief that the main thing you needed to do to unlock many of these mysteries was to measure things more carefully and to do that by treating instrumental effects as a science in and of themselves rather than mere engineering details.

Ian, of course, had a long and storied career before becoming a senior professor at Oxford. This started at Queen Mary in London for his undergrad, via Edinburgh/CERN for his doctorate, then to the US (Syracuse and later Purdue universities), with heavy involvement in the activities at several national labs, Fermilab in particular. After this he returned to the UK to lead the particle physics sub-department at Oxford, later becoming Head of Physics.

Becoming fascinated with CCDs

In terms of his technical contributions, at least in instrumentation, he is likely better known for his work on various particle physics experiments (CLEO, CMS, ATLAS, Mu3e, AION/MAGIS-100 and many more), but he was a part of the LSST project since around 2008 mainly involved in the camera side of things. Having done his own early technical detector work on micro-patterned gas detectors, he became fascinated with CCDs, because, as we often discussed, of the huge amount of flexibility and operating ‘tweaks’ one could make after fabrication: these being entirely analogue devices of modest output bandwidth by the standards of the chips used in modern particle physics, where the vast majority of interesting engineering decisions must be made at the chip integration stage or before, and where issues like the difficulty of Indium bump bonding often dominate quality considerations. CCDs by contrast are ‘simple’ monolithic passive pixel devices which nevertheless have a hugely rich device physics phenomenology, and for those of us deeply interested in device physics itself they are thus not only fantastic observational tools but wonderful playgrounds for “interesting” effects (mostly annoying effects from an astronomy point of view to be fair), because of how many of these interesting levers we can tweak “after the fact” just by messing around with external voltages and timings, affecting everything from the obvious (like linearity, gain and noise) to the more obscure (point spread function width and symmetry, full well capacity, image persistence and many more), in subtly interdependent ways.

Ian’s work on LSST encompassed many activities. In his lab in Purdue, he and former colleague Kirk Arndt, who also came to Oxford but sadly passed away a few years ago, made great contributions to the early design and testing of the corner raft wavefront sensing systems, and designed and built the aluminium cryostat that was eventually re-tooled to become the camera for the Rubin Observatory Auxtel LATISS instrument working with the groups at Harvard and the LSST project itself. A very similar cryostat (but decked out in Oxford Blue rather than Purdue Gold) was built for our lab in OPMD for testing and investigating sensor effects in the main focal plane.

A culture of trust

Ian (along with Prof Chris Damerell, whom he managed to convince out of retirement for the purpose) was fundamental in ensuring that Teledyne-e2v was able to deliver their part of the LSSTCam focal plane, including helping with the investigation of some rather vexing issues related to the low temperature performance. One thing that junior colleagues like me could always appreciate about Ian was that, although he was always interested in knowing the details of everything, he himself was mainly by this stage an expert in the larger scale of detector/instrument construction, rather than the detailed minutiae of modern sensor tuning and readout electronics.

He placed great trust and responsibility in his postdocs and students to be the up-to-the-minute experts on the real low-level details, and though he was always keen to talk specifics and ask difficult and probing questions, he very rarely overruled a detailed technical decision, preferring to trust that he’d hired the right people to get the job done. This was both an enormously rewarding opportunity and often a challenge. Luckily while Ian was often a very demanding boss, he always knew how to strike a balance by being utterly supportive and rewarding.

It was a great honour and pleasure to work with Ian for more than eight years on LSST. His insight and infectious curiosity will be greatly missed by several large communities in both astro and particle physics, particularly in solid state instrumentation development. Many of us have lost a highly regarded colleague and dear friend.

Daniel Philip Weatherill

LSST Solar System Readiness Sprint

At the end of September, 33 people gathered under the Oxford spires for the final LSST Solar System Readiness Sprint, the annual meeting of the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration (SSSC).

As the first sprint held outside the mainland US, the three-day meeting focused on the expectations for Rubin Observatory Year 1, the LSST survey strategy, Year 1 incremental templates, final community preparations for the start of the LSST, and synergies with the technosignature community. The meeting was made possible by generous support from Breakthough Listen, Karman+, the LSST Discovery Alliance, the Planetary Society, and LSST:UK. Logistical support was provided by the University of Oxford and Queen's University Belfast.

There were talks, discussion sessions, and dedicated time to work together on small group projects. Presentation topics included the Lasair broker and Adler Solar System Alert classifier, both LSST:UK in-kind contributions. Leanne Guy, representing the Rubin Data Management Team and Operations Team, gave an overview on the latest status of the construction project and the plans for the first year of the LSST; Clare Higgs from the Rubin Education and Public Outreach team presented the latest plans for enabling citizen science projects in collaboration with the Zooniverse (another LSST:UK in-kind contribution). 

We capped off the first night of the Sprint with a networking dinner at Exeter College and a rousing after-dinner speech by Mario Jurić, Rubin Solar System data products owner and Data Management liaison to the SSSC. Mario encouraged everyone to get their holidays in this year as everything will change when LSST data starts to flow! Next year, the SSSC plans to host the first of three LSST Solar System First Data Sprints, one of which will be held in Belfast in early 2026.

Meg Schwamb

LSST:UK Communications

A chance to help demystify LSST:UK and increase engagement in astronomy plus a training course to help those new to communicating their work.

Training for early career researchers – 12 November 2024

Highlight your work and engage others in astronomy

Eleanor O'Kane

Leadership positions held by LSST:UK members

Here is the latest list of significant leadership positions held by members of the LSST:UK consortium in the project and international Science Collaborations. If you are aware of any corrections or additions, please contact the LSST:UK Project Managers (George Beckett and Terry Sloan: lusc_pm@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk).

Forthcoming meetings of interest

Dates, locations and links… The current list of forthcoming meetings 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.