Introduction
Final reminder about NAM sessions
PCW and LSST@Europe4
Phase C proposal update
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.
Commissioning update
Working with undergrads at Oxford
Ian Shipsey and Daniel Philip Weatherill
Castor
Ruben Sanchez-Janssen
Recent LSST:UK Science Centre outputs
The LSST:UK Science Centre has recently produced the following technical reportsreport.
Title | Author | Description |
---|---|---|
C. Frohmaier, M. Sullivan | The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and the 4m multi-object spectroscopic telescope (4MOST) commence survey operations in late 2023 and early 2024 respectively. The Time-Domain Extragalactic Survey (TiDES) on 4MOST will follow-up LSST discovered transients to obtain spectroscopic measurements for tens-of-thousands of supernovae, galaxies, active-galactic nuclei (AGN), and strongly-lensed systems. For the transients and their hosts, this data will allow us to map the astrophysical diversity of cosmic explosions and measure the equation of state parameter for dark energy to unprecedented precision. TiDES forms the basis of LSST:UK’s WP3.3: Spectroscopic classification of transients. A key aspect of performing a reliable and efficient follow-up of transients is to create a discovery infrastructure within the LSST alerts stream. Access to this stream is served by several community brokers, allowing users to create custom filters and use value-added data products to fine-tune a selection algorithm to flag transients suitable for their science programme. This is exactly the use-case for TiDES and forms the core of this deliverable. Given that the start of LSST survey operations is expected late 2023/ early 2024, we are developing our selection algorithms on the Lasair-processed ZTF alerts stream. However, we have had to change the scope of our deliverable as ZTF suffered a prolonged outage during a key phase of the development cycle. As a result, this deliverable will not include the Lasair Kafka stream of ZTF alerts or our real-time Lasair filter to pre-select candidates. Instead, we present software that applies a customisable light curve-based selection function on any ZTF object from the archive of historical observations. This mimics a real-time feed, stepping through the observations and assessing each object against the user-defined selection criteria. The planned integration of this with a real-time feed will instead be presented in a future deliverable and the further down-stream connections with 4MOST will be implemented with deliverable D3.3.4 |
Forthcoming meetings of interest
Several meetings of potential interest have been scheduled for the coming months:
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.
25--29 July 2022 – Boom! A workshop on explosive transients with LSST is being hosted at University of Urbana-Chapaign, Urbana, in the week preceding the DESC Collaboration Meeting, to allow people to attend both meetings and reduce their overall travel costs.
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.
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.