Introduction
Another undisputed highlight of October for me was the live-streamed summit tour presented by Daniel Philip Weatherill. Dan has provided a link to that below, along with a small subset of the many photos he has been sharing with colleagues during his time on the summit.
This month also saw the start of a regular seminar series from the LSST Interdisciplinary Network for Collaboration and Computing (LINCC). LINCC is funded by the LSST Corporation and will be running a range of activities over the next few years to support preparation for LSST science - particularly as regards training and analysis software development. Raphael Shirley wrote a brief report on his attendance of the LINCC-sponsored “From Data to Software to Science” workshop in the April Newsletter, and the LINCC have now launched their Tech Talks series, which will take place every second Thursday of the month at 10am Pacific Time. Details of future talks can be found by following the announcement post in the Community forum.
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.
LINCC Tech Talks
LSST UK in-kind contribution: observational systematics for photometric redshift estimates
QianjunHang , Benjamin Joachimi , Ofer Lahav
Working with the Rubin Observatory SQuaRE team in Tucson
Some photographs and musings from Cerro Pachón
I’ve been working on site with the LSST Sit-Com team for a couple of months now, and there is about one month left in my current tour of duty. I have had the great privilege to meet up with and worked with a lot of colleagues I haven’t seen for years (since LSSTCam was just a bunch of sensors in climate controlled boxes and single sensor test stand setups), and met a lot of new people involved with Rubin as well. Updates on the substantive work I’ve assisted with are for another time, but since there were some very nice comments about the photos I shared both during LSST:UK team meetings and before the virtual observatory tour I did with Bruno Quint. I’ve written this article to share a few more photographs from in and around Rubin. The link to that video presentation is here: https://cernbox.cern.ch/index.php/s/KLhN3fohaRlFiAP (please let me know if you can’t get to it, it may require a CERN guest account). One small errata to the video is that in the discussion about the TMA motor control, I said that the encoder feedback for the TMA motors was likely optical tape based. Apparently the main feedback is actually based on precision Hall Effect sensors rather than optical tape, but there are also other encoders in the TMA as well. All the photos here have been fairly heavily JPEG compressed to be reasonable for the web, originals are available on request (they are all licensed with CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 for non-commercial use). I hope you enjoy them.
Forthcoming meetings of interest
Meetings of potential interest for the coming months include:
27th February – 3rd March – DESC Collaboration Meeting (virtual). Details to be published on DESC members website (login required).
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 Forthcoming LSST-related Meetings .
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.