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.

Bob Mann

Participants sought for Data Preview 0.2

The Rubin Community Engagement Team is seeking researchers wanting to participate in Data Preview 0.2, the second stage of the first of the Rubin data previews, which are intended to help people prepare for the arrival of LSST data by giving them early access to, and support in learning how to use, the tools in the Rubin Science Platform (RSP) that they will eventually use for analysis of LSST data.

Data Preview 0 (DP0) provides access, through the RSP, to simulated LSST data produced by DESC as part of its Data Challenge 2. Those who have been involved in DP0 to date have been impressed by the range of resources made available to the “DP0 delegates” and the collaborative spirit in which the regular “delegate assembly” meetings have operated. In particular, it is striking how the scope of the discussions with the group has extended beyond specifics of LSST data formats and tools, to encompass wider topics (e.g., Python, SQL, machine learning), so it is clear that the Data Preview programme will provide an excellent opportunity for education and training over the next few years, and one in which all LSST:UK Consortium members - particularly Early Career Researchers - are strongly encouraged to participate.

All LSST data rights holders - and, so, all current LSST:UK Affiliate PIs and Junior Associates - are eligible to apply to become a DP0 delegate via a webform with a closing date of 30 April 2022. Those who already have DP0 delegate status from the earlier DP0.1 call do not need to re-apply now.

Bob Mann

Executive Group elections

The current terms of three of the five elected members of the LSST:UK Executive Group come to an end in April 2022. We shall launch the formal election process via a dedicated email to the lusc-announce list in mid-April, but this newsletter item is intended to encourage people to consider putting themselves forward for one of the three vacancies.

Our governance document notes that “The principal role of the Executive Group is to fulfil, on a more regular cadence, the role of the Board in providing guidance to the project leadership and ensuring that the project is progressing to the maximal benefit of the UK community” while it “also has a quality assurance role in the assessment of project deliverables and consideration of change requests (described in more detail in the Project Management Plan) and may provide comments (e.g. in the evaluation of pool travel proposals) when administrative tasks within the Consortium require scientific input”. To that end, the Exec Group meets monthly by videoconference (for ~60 minutes), with occasional email traffic between meetings, with membership offering insight into the workings of the Rubin Observatory and LSST:UK, as well as the chance to help steer the work of the latter.

My email to the lusc-announce list in a couple of weeks' time will solicit nominations - including self-nominations - to be sent to me by a deadline in late April, along with a brief statement summarising the nominee’s involvement to date in LSST and LSST:UK. In the event that there are more nominees than vacancies those statements will be circulated to the Consortium Board, who will then vote to select who will fill the three free places on the Exec Group.

Those wishing more information about the role of Exec Group member are welcome to contact myself or Bob Mann, and, as with all Consortium positions, we particularly encourage applications from those who would enhance the diversity of the Consortium leadership.

Mike Watson

Report from the Rubin-Euclid Derived Data Products Working Group

The Rubin-Euclid Derived Data Products Coordination Group has released its first report on suggestions for sharing derived data products (DDPs) from both telescopes. Derived data products are those that are created from the raw data, such as catalogues, rather than the raw data itself. The essential idea is that these data products will be created by both collaborations for joint use to carry out various science, both cosmological as well as legacy science relating to issues such as galaxy evolution, time-domain astrophysics, and studies of the constituents of our own Galaxy .

This group was established to find ways in which the two telescopes can work together to support each other’s mission. As Euclid has higher resolution and Rubin has a nominal deeper depth, there are aspects of both surveys that will be useful for the other. The current result is a report published as arXiv:2201.03862: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.03862

Included in the report are five 'cross-cutting DDPs' which will enable a wide range of complementary science goals, as well as more science-specific DDPs which are more focused on individual science cases. The report includes a description of the science which will be enabled by these DDPs, the resources needed to carry out these DDPs, as well as the time-scales in which they will be useful.

The major recommendation is for allowing catalogues sharing in the overlap between the two surveys. This will allow for a variety of science to be carried out. including modelling of spectral energy distributions, as well as measurement of more accurate photometric redshifts for galaxies seen in both surveys. Another major aspect of the report is sharing imaging data for limited locations of the sky where unique objects are found in either of the surveys. The use of Euclid higher resolution data is also essential for differential chromatic refraction corrections in Rubin. This document will now serve as the basis for future discussions amongst the Euclid and Rubin consortiums and how to set up concrete ways to deliver these DDPs.

Prof. Christopher Conselice

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Rubin session at the RAS NAM in Warwick - call for contributions

We have been allocated 2 x 90 min slots for a session at the RAS National Astronomy meeting on “Preparing for the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time.” This year’s meeting will be held at the University of Warwick between the 11th-15th July 2022 https://nam2022.org . Our double session is split over the Monday and Tuesday.

In the first of the 90min slots, we will provide overview information for those just starting out with their LSST data engagement as well as more detailed information for those who have been engaged over the last few years. Themes will include: Data Previews, data access, data primers and commissioning; Early science - time domain, the first Data Releases, synergies with other data (focused on science talks from early career researchers); Updates on the LSST:UK contributions to Rubin - how to maximise science and our contribution to the Rubin project.

We welcome and encourage submissions from the community to fill the second of the 90min slots on Tuesday on science and technical topics associated with LSST data and links to other projects. Abstract submission with a deadline of 14th April is here : https://nam2022.org/science/abstract-submission

A subgroup from the LSST:UK Exec will form the SOC (S. Smartt, A. Verma, J. Stott, G. Smith, B. Mann) for the meeting and will select the speakers. We very much encourage a diverse range of contributions.

Will Clarkson is the new Science Collaboration Coordinator

Bob Mann

Phase C proposal progress update

The LSST:UK Science Centre (LUSC) Phase C proposal has been submitted to STFC: a version of the science case, with finance tables removed, is available to Consortium members through the Science Working Group space on the LSST:UK wiki. The proposal has now been sent out for review, and we expect to receive the reviewers' comments in mid-May. We will then appear before PPRP in Swindon on 15 June, to be followed by a Visiting Panel meeting in August or September. PPRP will then make a recommendation to be considered by STFC Science Board at its December meeting.

The proposal is seeking funding for the portion of the UK’s agreed in-kind contribution to Rubin operations that falls within the period 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2027. The three main components of that are: (i) the continuation of the LUSC-DEV programme, providing user-generated data products and software to produce them; (ii) the transition of the LUSC-DAC activity from prototyping into operation of an LSST Data Access Centre in the UK; and (iii) the start of LUSC-DRP, which comprises our 25% share of the annual Data Release Processing workload. Additional contributions will cover some specific staffing roles that will aid our integration into the Rubin operations consortium and our exploitation of the data rights we will be earn through our in-kind package, as well as covering our contribution to Rubin Commissioning.

Taken together this represents a very exciting and diverse programme of work, which will set the UK up very well for a generation’s scientific exploitation of the data from the ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

Bob Mann

From Data to Software to Science

Report on the recent workshop at the Center for Computational Astrophysics of the Flatiron Institute organised by LSST Interdisciplinary Network for Collaboration and Computing (LINCC) Frameworks team.

In my own work over the last two years we have been building a pipeline for joint processing of LSST and VISTA near infrared imaging as part of the UK’s in kind contribution. We have been iterating on the data to software to science cycle and it was exciting to see how the world astronomy community has been approaching these interacting elements from different perspectives. The real consensus that I took away from the conference is that we are all anticipating and hoping that the Rubin data will lead to a step change in the way we all do science. One senior astronomer recalled how before the Sloan Digital Sky Survey many astronomers were completely unfamiliar with using structured query language to generate lists of astronomical objects and that they fully expected equally disruptive technologies to emerge from LSST. 

The bulk of the workshop was spent developing a series of science cases. These all came out of open discussions starting with science aims and then trying to specify concrete technical requirements to allow them. I mainly attended discussions on photometric redshifts and spectral energy distribution fitting for extragalactic science cases. We are working under the assumption that there will be a single default photometric redshift product. It is a real challenge to satisfy requirements from all of the science collaborations and more bespoke solutions will be required by many teams. A focus was therefore on providing tools to run and test competing algorithms against an array of metrics.

My day to day work is focused on low level technical details. Anyone who has followed the LSST near infrared fusion project will know that the Butler middleware is a key part of our development focus. The conference was a further reminder that many scientists have no experience with the actual LSST Science Pipeline code and we have to make sure that all our work will be accessible to the full range of users. The focus for a lot of us now is therefore ensuring that all our work fits into the wider environment of data access services being provided. In particular, the Rubin Science Platform is of course at the center of all this work. Using this, accessing the Butler, and handling small samples in addition to running large area algorithms at scale is a major challenge.

The next two years will see an immense amount of activity as we expect to see actual on sky data. I feel like we are preparing for a hundred meter sprint and working to have everything in place for the starting gun. We don’t know exactly when it will occur, there may be false starts and we can’t prepare for every eventuality, but this is an incredible opportunity. We are present at the start of a huge scientific project and when the data starts rolling in we can realistically hope to see a vast array of discoveries. This will involve the full spectrum from software developers to scientists working together and learning from each other. I look forward to seeing the final document summarizing all the collaborative work that was started in New York a few weeks ago. There is a lot of work to be done building all the infrastructure to serve all the varied science cases but there is already an incredible technological base and the final stages are starting to fit into place.

Raphael Shirley

Forthcoming meetings of interest

Several meetings of potential interest have been scheduled for the coming months. 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:

• 8-12 August 2022 – 2022 Project and Community Workshop, Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain Resort, Tucson. This is primarily an in-person event, though some sessions (plenaries and general-interest sessions) will be virtually accessible for those who cannot attend in person.

• 1–5 August 2022 – the next DESC Collaboration Meeting will be held during 1st–5th August at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. More details will be available soon on the DESC Confluence site (login required).

• 11–15 July 2022 – National Astronomy Meeting is being held at Warwick University. In particular, two parallel sessions may be of interest: Preparing for the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time organised by LSST:UK; and Discovery in Astronomy and Space Physics enabled by large-scale Digital Research Infrastructures (ASTROCOMP) organised by the IRIS programme.

Members of the Consortium (not in receipt of travel funding through one of the Science Centre grants) may apply for travel support for meetings of this kind via the the LSST:UK Pool Travel Fund. Details are available at https://lsst-uk.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/HOME/pages/25853997/LSST+UK+Pool+Travel+Fund .

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.

George Beckett

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.

The Wide-Field Astronomy Unit at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh will soon be is advertising two positions related to the UK’s LSST Data Access Centre. Both appointments - a Research Software Engineer position working full-time on LSST and a Senior Research Software Engineer position to be shared 50/50 between LSST and Gaia - will be for two years, in the first instance, with the possibility of extension contingent on future funding, and both will suit applicants with strong Python skills and experience of data-intensive research projects and technical software development. The RSE position will join the DAC team working on the operation and optimisation of data handling systems such as the Rubin Data Butler, the Qserv distributed database, and RSP data interfaces. In LSST, the Senior RSE will develop expertise in using the Rubin Science Platform, guide UK customisations to the platform, and work with science groups to develop and optimise their analysis workflows.

The positions will be are advertised through the University of Edinburgh jobs site in early April, with a closing date TBC, as the system is currently undergoing an upgrade, but of 17.00 on 9 May 2022, and those interested are strongly encouraged to contact Bob Mann or George Beckett informally first.