Introduction
Those with ideas for future newsletter items should contact the LSST:UK Project Managers (George Beckett and Terry Sloan: lusc_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.
2020 Rubin Observatory Project and Community Workshop
The 2020 Project and Community Workshop (PCW) took place online on August 10-14, with approximately four hours of presentations per day, divided into three main sessions. The table below presents the workshop schedule, with links to relevant page on the PCW website, from which presentation materials - including YouTube recordings of the sessions - can be accessed.
Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | |||||
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Plenary 1: Construction QA | Plenary 2: Operations QA | Plenary 3: Science Collaborations Report | Plenary 4: Science Keynote: "From disruption, opportunity: the current and future impact of AI on astronomy" (Dr. Brian Nord) | ||||||
Rubin Research Bytes | In-kind proposal workshop | ||||||||
There is a lot of interesting material there, but, obviously, the plenary sessions are a good place to start.
The Rubin staff and Science Collaboration leaders put a lot of thought into how to make a large conference work online. Through the provision of pre-recorded videos and other preparatory materials to study before the sessions, and with dedicated staff carefully monitoring session-specific Slack channels as well as the Zoom chat window, it proved possible to circumvent some of the limitations of the medium, and to get some level of interaction amongst the globally-distributed online participants, although, of course, there is no real online substitute for the chat in the coffee break or in the bar after dinner.
The impact of satellite constellations on the Legacy Survey of Space and Time
Lasair
Lasair-ZTF is now a mature working service, and development of Lasair-LSST is well underway! In this item we will take a quick look at what you can do now, and where we are headed. We have already benefited from considerable user input, but more is always welcome.
The Rubin Observatory is expected to produce (on average) 10 million alerts every night. Getting these to users is a real challenge; the project approach is to feed the stream to third party services known as community brokers. A review process is underway to select a small number of these; the LSST:UK offering is the Lasair broker, being developed by a team in Belfast and Edinburgh. Lasair means "flame" or "flash" in both Irish and Scots Gaelic, which seems appropriate for this Celtic Collaboration. We showcased our efforts so far at a dedicated brokers session at the recent Rubin Observatory "Project and Community Workshop", recently held on line (see the item by Bob Mann in this newsletter).
To prototype Lasair, we built a system to process nightly alerts from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). However, this has gone well beyond a simple technical prototype - it is a working service being used by astronomers across the world to do science. In April we released Lasair 2.0 (see https://lasair.roe.ac.uk). This is now considered a mature and stable service, which will keep working while in the background we develop and test the next-generation Lasair, for the alerts which will come from the Legacy Survey for Space and Time (LSST) conducted at the Rubin Observatory. For short, we generally refer to the current working service as Lasair-ZTF, and the next generation version as Lasair-LSST.
As the ZTF-alerts stream into Lasair, we add multi-wavelength context, IDs, classification and other added value using our Sherlock software. You can query the accumulating database in various different ways, or produce a filtered stream which is sent on to you. You can also make a "watchlist" of your favourite objects and get alerted when one of them flares up. As well as the web interface, we have a Jupyter interface, which means you can write Python scripts to do all sorts of cunning things. Thanks to the UK IRIS service, there is some pretty high-powered computing facility behind all this. To learn more about what you can do, go the Lasair website (https://lasair.roe.ac.uk), or take a look at the Lasair cookbook (https://lsst-uk.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/881360908/Lasair+Cookbook). )
Meanwhile, we have been developing and testing a new and improved version for Rubin/LSST. For Cycles 1 and 2 of our planning process we have been concentrating on technical questions - system architecture, backend database technology, direct Kafka stream handling, and so on. All this was based on the detailed Phase B science requirements. However, as we move into Cycles 3 and 4, our focus will increasingly be on improving the functionality and the user experience. We kicked off this process in June with a kind of focus-group with the core of interested consortium scientists, which was extremely successful and informative. We are also having direct conversations with key projects and collaborations, such as the Zooniverse people, and the TiDES project. However, we are also happy (and indeed keen!) to hear the desires, experiences, and suggestions of any interested users. One of the things we are reviewing right now is how to construct a good helpdesk system - but for now, send your suggestions to lasair-help@lists.roe.ac.uk.
We have a feeling that this process will be about users evolving as well as the project learning - as people get used to the idea of working with streams, as opposed to querying static databases, new ideas will emerge. So we are especially interested in hearing your thoughts on that issue.
Results of JA round
At the end of June, LSST:UK issued a call for applications from potential new Junior Associates. Following a review by the LSST:UK Selection Committee, chaired by Nial Tanvir (Leicester), we are pleased to confirm that 22 new Junior Associates have been approved, plus four existing Junior Associates had their term extended (indicated by *), as follows:
Qasim Afghan (UCL) | Steven Gough-Kelly (Central Lancashire) |
Alba Vega Alonso Tetilla (Southampton) | Noushin Karim (Surrey) |
Marika Asgari (Edinburgh) | Hin Leung (St. Andrews) |
Oliver Bartlett (Hull) | Matt Ratcliffe (Newcastle) |
Matteo Biancoi * (Birmingham) | Agata Rożek (Edinburgh) |
Asa Bluck (Cambridge) | Jaime Ruiz Zapatero (Oxford) |
Umar Burhanudin (Sheffield) | Shubham Srivastav (QUB) |
Matteo Cataneo (Edinburgh) | Paula Stella Teixeira (St. Andrews) |
Cressida Cleland (Birmingham) | Edward Upsdell (sussex) |
Azadeh Fattahi (Durham) | Roy Williams * (Edinburgh) |
Hao Fu * (Southampton) | Tom Wilson (Exeter) |
Carlos Garcia (Oxford) | Bill Wright (QMU) |
Benjamin Giblin * (Edinburgh) | Yirui Zheng (St Andrews) |
The next call, which will be for both Affiliate PIs and Junior Associates will open in October 2020, for appointments from 1st January 2021. The call will be advertised on Confluence (on the https://lsst-uk.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/HOME ) plus advised to the LUSC Announce mailing list (see LSST:UK Announcements Email List for information on how to subscribe).
Recent LSST:UK outputs
LSST:UK has recently produced the following technical reports.
Title | Author | Description |
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D2.5.1 Training resources for LSST:UK DAC users | Bob Mann, Stelios Voutsinas, Roy Williams | This document describes an initial release of documentation for users of current and future services accessed via the UK’s LSST Data Access Centre (DAC). This documentation release is necessarily limited in scope given that the UK DAC is still being developed. It comprises existing documentation for the Lasair alert broker and a very preliminary set of documentation for the LSST Science Platform (LSP). The LSP is the set of data services to be provided by the Rubin Observatory to support analysis of LSST data products. |