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Introduction
It’s conference season and, as George Beckett notes below, there are a number of LSST:UK-related meetings in the next few months. The first of those is the National Astronomy Meeting at Warwick, which includes parallel sessions on Preparing for the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time on the Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, plus a talk on LSST:UK computing in the Discovery in Astronomy and Space Physics enabled by large-scale Digital Research Infrastructures (ASTROCOMP) session on the Monday morning.
Registration is also open (and will close on July 22nd) for both in-person and remote The latest Rubin News Digest notes that construction work on the submit has been disrupted by a recent winter storm, which dumped up to six feet of snow in some areas around Cerro Pachón; NOIRLab have posted a video showing the scene after the storm, with Rubin visible near the start, and a site damage assessment is underway. Meanwhile, back at SLAC, the camera team is now operating a pumped coolant chiller, which has been developed as an alternative to the original vapour-compression based refrigeration system, as that has been exhibiting some long-term instabilities during testing.
Due to Covid restrictions, registration for in-person attendance of the 2022 Project and Community Workshop taking place in Tucson on August 8-12 . Finally, pre-registration is has now closed, but it is still possible to register to attend virtually. The PCW website now also contains a detailed agenda for the workshop, which notes which breakout sessions offer remote participation - in addition to the plenaries, which will all be live-streamed, with remote participants having the opportunity to submit questions via Slack.
Pre-registration remains open for the LSST@Europe4 meeting, which we held in Rome on October 24-28. In-person attendance is limited to 100 people, so those wishing to attend in person should pre-register soon, while the deadline for registering for virtual participation is September 15.
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.
LSST session at NAM
We had 2 x 90 minute sessions at the RAS National Astronomy meeting at the University of Warwick : https://nam2022.org/science/parallel-sessions on the topic of “Preparing for the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time”. The recordings of the talks are available on the NAM reattendance site for those that have access through registration. With the permission of the speakers, we have linked the talk slides below. For those starting off in the project, the presentations by Federica Bianco and Melissa Graham are particularly use starting points for information. Stephen Smartt (on behalf of Bob Mann) presented the UK’s status in the project and Roy Williams presented a overview and introduction on how to get started with accessing the early science data that will come through the alert streams in the UK’s Lasair Broker.
There was encouraging attendance at the sessions and we welcomed many early career scientists as they learned about data access and the UK’s status in Rubin directly from some of the Rubin Project leadership team, and of the ongoing work being done by postdoctoral level scientists across the UK in a diverse range of topics.
The first session, chaired by our LSST:UK Commissioning Coordinator Graham Smith, was focused particularly on new and potential users aimed at raising interest in data access to the Rubin’s survey data.
Federica Bianco : Deputy Project Scientist for Rubin Construction project. Federica was overall chair off the LSST Science Collaborations, and is co-chair of the Transients and Variable Stars collaboration. "Status of the Rubin Project and the Science Collaborations".
Melissa Graham : Lead Community Scientist for the Community Engagement Team and as a Science Analyst for the Data Management team. "The Rubin Science Platform and data access - early data previews and releases"
Stephen Smartt and Bob Mann - up to date summary of the UK’s role in the Rubin Observatory
The second 90min session was made up of contributed talks from the community, chaired by John Stott of the LSST:UK Executive.
Agata Rożek - Application of NoiseChisel to detecting faint small-body activity with the LSST
Daniel Weatherill - Commissioning and Instrument Signature Reduction of the LSST camera
Paul Giles - X-rays in the era of LSST
Tom J Wilson - Enabling Early Rubin Science with Robust Cross-Matches in the Crowded LSST Sky
Dummy title for Ian and Dan
Ian Shipsey and Daniel Philip Weatherill
Recent LSST:UK Science Centre outputs
The LSST:UK Science Centre has recently produced the following technical reports.
Title | Author | Description |
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Forthcoming meetings of interest
Meetings of potential interest for the coming months include:
25–29 October 2022 -- Rubin Observatory LSST@Europe4, at Accademia dei Lincei, Rome, Italy. The will be a hybrid meeting with a limited number of in-person spaces. Registration for virtual participation is open until 15th September..
17–22 October 2022 – DESC Sprint Week, at University of Michigen, Ann Arbor. Details to be published on DESC members website (login required).
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.
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.