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Introduction
The past month has seen two major construction milestones. Both were the subject of Rubin press releases, so many people will have seen them already, but their significance warrants mentioning them again here. The first was the coating of the primary/tertiary mirror blank to create the beautiful object shown to the right: there is also a video on YouTube, which shows the process in more detail. The second, described in more detail by Eleanor O'Kane below, was the arrival of LSSTCam on Cerro Pachón (bottom right).
The safe arrival of the camera is, of course, a major milestone in itself, but it also marks the removal of the main source of uncertainty in the timeline to the start of survey operations: for some time, events in the final stages of Rubin construction have been expressed w.r.t. to the shipping of LSSTCam, so the next revision of the plan for the early science programme should contain more precise dates for events up to Data Release 1.
The Observatory has recently published a new survey strategy website. Its initial role is primarily to gather together resources relating to the optimisation of the survey strategy – e.g. a summary of the activities of the Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC) and links to the simulations that have underpinned them – but, once operations start, it will also publish survey progress reports. Rubin have also released the 2024 instalment of their A Day in the Life of the Rubin Observatory video series, showing Observatory staff at work on 22 February 2024; it’s great to see so many of them at the summit, whereas earlier instalments were filled with people in front of monitors at institutions around the US.
The LSST Discovery Alliance is currently running another of its calls for funding through its LINCC Incubators programme. This programme “will support teams of researchers to test, apply, or expand early-stage analysis software being developed as a part of LINCC Frameworks using their own exciting scientific investigations with existing surveys or simulated data” and counted Meg Schwamb and Tom J Wilson among its first four awardees: they were supported, respectively, to optimise the LSST Solar System Simulator and to incorporate into the LINCC Framework the cross-matching software being developed as one of the UK’s in-kind contributions. The deadline for brief stage-one proposals is 11:59 pm Pacific time on Monday, 17 June.
Finally, you’ll see at the end of this newsletter links to the LSST:UK accounts on X and BlueSky, recently started by Eleanor O'Kane. Please consider following LSST:UK if you use either of these social media platforms, and reposting items sent by LSST:UK; conversely, Eleanor O'Kane is building up a list of accounts to follow and is happy to repost relevant items.
Positive response to the Introduction to the RSP sessions
Over the course of February, March and April 2024, James Mullaney delivered ten in-person and one online Introduction to the Rubin Science Platform (RSP) sessions. The in-person sessions took place at different locations around the UK, ranging from as far south as Portsmouth and Surrey, all the way north to Durham and Edinburgh, and as westward as Belfast! Thanks to all those who helped with local organisation – the sessions couldn’t have gone ahead without you!
Each session started off with a presentation to introduce attendees to the project and the UK’s involvement, and to provide guidance on how to apply to obtain Principal Investigator or Junior Associate status within LSST:UK. This was followed by three roughly hour-long tutorials that used Jupyter Notebooks to demonstrate how to connect to a Data Access Center and retrieve and analyse Data Preview 0.2 data. All the material used during the sessions are available via the Introduction to the RSP website.
In total, over 80 people attended either an in-person or online event, which far outstripped even our most optimistic expectations and underlines how much the UK astronomical community is looking forward to Rubin first light and the subsequent data releases. Approximately a third (31%) of attendees self-identified as non-male. The feedback from sessions was overwhelmingly positive (some selected comments are listed below), but one thing that was often mentioned and that we’ve heard loud and clear is that people want more hands-on sessions so they too can retrieve and analyse data with someone on-hand to provide guidance. Plans are already being made into how we will be able to accommodate more hands-on sessions, as well as running some more Introductory sessions for those who couldn’t come to any of this year’s sessions and, of course, new arrivals to the field. New sessions – including a planned pre-recorded introductory one – will be announced via newsletter, LUSC-announce email, and your institute’s LSST:UK board member.
As promised, I’ll leave you with just a few of the positive comments we received following the sessions (if only to tempt others to attend future sessions!):
Great session, well described and easy to understand. Looking forward to getting to play with the data.
Thanks for the very useful and informative session - I appreciated your enthusiasm and knowledge of the RSP :). As someone who has used the RSP a small amount already, it was very useful to put things I'd previously used (like the butler) into context.
This was a really useful session, and have a great overview of how we can access Rubin data. Future hacking style workshops will be great in the future!
Everything was really well explained and the thought process was very clearly laid out :)
Thanks for a great introduction to the RSP. I learned a lot and now feel that accessing and using the data is within reach for me and my colleagues.
Lasair: The Movie
Shipping the largest camera ever built for astrophysics
How do you move a $168 million, car-sized camera from California to a Chilean mountaintop? That was the challenge for the LSST Camera team.
The successful arrival of the LSST Camera to Cerro Pachón on 16 May 2024 means that the final major component of Rubin’s Simonyi Survey Telescope is now on site. The meticulously-prepared shipping plan was designed to reduce potential risk to the camera. Before shipping, the camera was mounted on a custom shipping frame and wrapped in plastic electrostatic discharge material to protect it from moisture. An overhead crane was used to instal the camera – in its frame – in a 6-metre container that was insulated to prevent overheating. Once installed, the frame was securely clamped to the container’s metal floor struts.
Data loggers monitored temperature, humidity, vibration, and accelerations throughout the trip. Additionally, a GPS tracking system allowed the team to pinpoint the camera’s location at any point on the journey. Thanks to a 2021 dress rehearsal, when data loggers were used in the shipping of the camera mass simulator to Chile, the team were aware of potential issues.
Two LSST Camera team members accompanied the camera on its 10-hour flight from San Francisco to Arturo Merino Benítez Airport in Santiago. Upon landing, a convoy of nine vehicles travelled to the base of Cerro Pachón. The final 21.7 mile drive along winding dirt roads from the base to the summit took five hours.
Upon its arrival at the observatory building, the camera was unloaded and moved into Rubin’s white room. Data collected by the data loggers confirmed that the camera had not encountered any unexpected stresses.
The LSST Camera is due to undergo several months of testing in the observatory’s white room. Following this, it will be installed on the telescope along with Rubin’s newly-coated 8.4-meter primary mirror and 3.4-metre secondary mirror.
Block agenda for Rubin Community workshop now online
The Rubin Community Workshop takes place at SLAC, Menlo Park, California from 22-26 July 2024. The block agenda has been published on the meeting website.
The year’s meeting will have an emphasis on Rubin LSST science and the needs of the community. All plenaries and breakout sessions will be accessible by virtual participation.few days have seen Rubin Operations Rehearsal 4 (OR4), which has exercised more of the end-to-end observatory system, with a (simulated) data stream flowing from the summit to the US Data Facility at SLAC, where the Prompt Products pipeline was run on it, to generate alerts that were then sent out in near-real-time to the suite of Community Brokers, including our own Lasair. This provided the Lasair team with valuable experience of handling an alert stream flowing at a much greater rate than that provided by ZTF, which they have been consuming for some time. Hopefully, they will describe the lessons they learnt from this in next month’s Newsletter, where we might also hear from James Mullaney , who has been studying the quality of the coadded images produced during OR4, as part of his role as the UK’s Data Processing Scientist.
Elsewhere on the summit, ComCam has been removed from the Telescope Mount Assembly until the secondary mirror has been installed, which is expected to happen during July.
The 2024 Rubin Community Workshop (22-26 July) is taking shape, with a fairly final programme now available. Registration for in-person attendance has now closed, but further remote attendees are welcome to register still. Meanwhile, closer to home, we have published the near-final programme for the pair of LSST:UK sessions at NAM2024, which is taking place the week before that (14-19 July) in Hull. The current version of the programme is listed below, and an up-to-date version will remain available here.
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New paper: NEural Engine for Discovering Luminous Events (NEEDLE)
A new paper from Xinyue Sheng and collaborators introduces NEEDLE, a tool for discovering large samples of rare events designed for the Lasair alert broker.
Published in the June 2024 edition of MNRAS, the paper is entitled NEural Engine for Discovering Luminous Events (NEEDLE): identifying rare transient candidates in real time from host galaxy images.
Known for their efficiency in analysing large data sets, machine learning-based classifiers have been widely used in wide-field sky survey pipelines. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will generate millions of real-time alerts every night, enabling the discovery of large samples of rare events. Identifying such objects soon after explosion will be essential to study their evolution. This requires a machine learning framework that makes use of all the information available, including light curve, host galaxy and other contextual data.
Using ~5400 transients from the ZTF Bright Transient Survey as training and testing data, we developed NEEDLE, a novel hybrid (convolutional neural network + dense neural network) classifier to select for two rare classes with strong environmental preferences: superluminous supernovae (SLSNe) preferring dwarf galaxies, and tidal disruption events (TDEs) occurring in the centres of nucleated galaxies.
Our network is designed with LSST in mind and we expect performance to improve further with the higher resolution images and more accurate transient and host photometry that will be available from Rubin. Our system is currently deployed as an annotator on the UK alert broker, Lasair, to provide predictions to the community in real time.
The NEEDLE pipeline design for the alert broker Lasair. NEEDLE receives ZTF (and ultimately LSST) alerts from Lasair via a customized SQL filter to remove old or bogus objects. The science and reference images are contained in the ZTF alerts, or requested from the Rubin Science Platform. If they pass the quality checker, the host metadata will be fetched from sherlock and Pan-STARRS. Finally, NEEDLE will return the probabilities for the three classes to the Lasair annotation database, allowing them to be used in subsequent alert filters by any user.
Access the paper: NEural Engine for Discovering Luminous Events (NEEDLE): identifying rare transient candidates in real time from host galaxy images
Xinyue Sheng, Matt Nicholl,Ken Smith , Dave Young ,Roy Williams, Heloise Stevance, Stephen Smartt, Shubham Srivastav and Thomas Moore.
Xinyue Sheng
Programme for LSST:UK sessions at NAM2024
We have a pair of sessions at NAM - 09.00-11.00 and 15.00-17.00 on Monday 15 July - dedicated to Preparing for UK involvement in early science with the Rubin LSST.
As in recent years, the time is divided by a few invited talks, which provide an introduction to the Rubin LSST and LSST:UK to the wider NAM audience, plus a series of contributed talks, covering both some of the UK in-kind contributions to Rubin operations and some of the preparatory science being undertaken within the UK LSST community. We are very grateful that Bob Blum, the Rubin Operations Director, will be able to join us again, providing a Rubin status update at the end of the afternoon. The full programme is listed below, and we hope to see many of you in Hull or online on 15 July.
Session 1: 09.00-11.00
09.00: Introduction and summary of UK involvement in the Rubin LSST (Bob Mann)
09.20: LSST survey strategy and early science plans (Stephen Smartt)
09.50: Preparations for Rubin Data Release productions (James Mullaney)
10.20: Photometric galaxy clustering with HSC DR3: an LSST precursor study (Tom Cornish)
10.40: Enabling early Rubin science with robust cross-matches in the crowded LSST sky (Tom Wilson)
Session 2: 15.00-17.00
15.00: Detecting the Galactic interstellar object population with LSST (Matthew Hopkins)
15.20: Eliciting astrophysical distributions from imperfect survey data (Dustin Mason)
15.40: Probing galaxy clusters with the XMM Cluster Survey and implications for LSST (Paul Giles)
16.00: TBC
16.20: Higher order statistics in Rubin data (Lea Harscouet)
16.40: Rubin Observatory update (Bob Blum)
Call for expressions of interest for Lasair User Group
We are in the process of establishing a Lasair Users Group, and would like to invite expressions of interest in being involved.
If that might be you, please email Andy Lawrence (al@roe.ac.uk) and Roy Williams (roy@roe.ac.uk), stating your possible interest, and explaining very briefly why you are interested, and why you would be a good person to have involved. The deadline for expressions of interest is Monday 22 July 2024.
Until now, we have tended to gather feedback and advice from our user community in a series of 'focus group' style workshops, or via LSST:UK Team Meetings and so on. But as we work towards the transition from ZTF service to becoming a Rubin/LSST community broker, we would like to start something slightly more formal and regular - a Users Group of something like six scientists.
This group would meet twice a year - probably once in person and once online, with an agenda of items to discuss. We will also set up a dedicated Slack channel, for discussions to continue informally between meetings.
We welcome expressions of interest from all astronomers who expect to utilise Rubin transients. The current Lasair team is strong on extragalactic phenomena such as supernovae and tidal disruption events: therefore we especially welcome those interested in Galactic variable stars, microlensing, strong lensing, the local group, AGN, and citizen science.
The LSST:UK Consortium is committed to promoting equity, diversity and inclusion and specifically encourages applications from members of under-represented groups within the UK community who would increase the diversity of the LSST:UK science direction.
A draft home page has been set up at Lasair Users Group
Andy Lawrence Roy Williams Stephen Smartt on behalf of the Lasair Team
Heloise Stevance wins Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship
Heloise Stevance, one of the LSST:UK Science Liaisons for the Alan Turing Institute (ATI) Space Science Interest Group, has won the 2024 Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship.
Awarded by the RAS, the Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship was established in 2018 to support promising women astronomers early in their careers.
A computational astronomer and Schmidt A.I. in Science Fellow, Heloise is based at the University of Oxford where she works in partnership with Stephen Smartt . She is developing A.I. models for international sky surveys.
Heloise told LSST:UK: “It is an honour to be awarded the 2024 Caroline Herschel Prize, and for such an institution to recognise that the future of AI in science will rely on individuals being ‘fluent’ in two fields to see both opportunities and pitfalls.
“In the era of LSST, more than ever, humans will have to work alongside computers to make decisions that will affect how we gather and interpret data. The choices we make now about A.I. will affect future generations of astronomers; it is our responsibility to be cautious and informed.”
Latest LUSC meeting at Imperial College
Imperial College, London was the setting for the recent LSST:UK Science Centre (LUSC) team meeting on 11 June 2024.
Team members met in-person and online to hear some of the latest developments from several work packages. Among the presentations,Aaron Watkins provided an update on his work ensure the data reduction pipeline does not remove LSB flux from images; Amanda Ibsenpresented progress on the work to ingest DP0.2 (a simulated dataset with 5 years of simulation) and Qserv; and Steph Merritt and James Robinsonintroduced Adler, an open source classifier for transient activities in solar system.
With the recent achievement of several Rubin milestones, the science that the LUSC team will facilitate moves ever closer. Thank you to Boris Leistedt, who did an excellent job to ensure everything from the technology to the tea and coffee breaks ran smoothly.
In case you missed it: Rubin on the BBC
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the groundbreaking work of Vera Rubin herself were featured in a recent episode of The Sky at Night on BBC4. The episode, Cosmic Ghosts, aired on 10 June.
Maggie Aderin-Pocock demonstrated how Vera Rubin was a trailblazer for women in astronomy as well as a key figure in the discovery of dark matter.
Launched in 1957, The Sky at Night is one of the longest running television programmes in the world; it is co-presented by LSST:UK’s Public Outreach Coordinator Chris Lintott .
Maggie Aderin-Pocock, one of the presenters of The Sky at Night spoke about the Rubin Observatory in the episode that aired on 10 June. It is available on the BBC iPlayer.
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.
Dates | Meeting Title / Event | Meeting Website/ Contact | Meeting location / venue |
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08/Jul/24-12/Jul/24 | DESC Collaboration Meeting | Switzerland | ETZ Zurich | |
14/Jul/24 - 19/Jul/24 | RAS National Astronomy Meeting 2024 | Abstract submission closes 3 June. | Hull |
22/Jul/24-25/Jul/24 | Catching supermassive black holes with Rubin-LSST: Towards novel insights and discoveries into AGN science | https://indico.ict.inaf.it/event/2784/ Registration is now open. | Italy | Turin |
22/Jul/24-26/Jul/24 | Rubin Community Workshop 2024 | In-person registration deadline is 21 June or when there are 250 attendees. | USA | SLAC, California (hybrid) |
16/Sep/24—20/Sep/24 | LSST@Europe6 | Spain | Island of La Palma |
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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 LSST:UK Pool Travel Fund. Details are available at Forthcoming LSST-related Meetings |
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If you have significant news or announcements that are directly relevant to LSST:UK and would like to share them in a future newsletter, contact Eleanor O'Kane (email eokane@roe.ac.uk) |
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