Skip to end of metadata
Go to start of metadata

You are viewing an old version of this page. View the current version.

Compare with Current View Page History

« Previous Version 4 Next »

Introduction

New WPs

New project schedule

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.

Bob Mann


LSST:UK All-Hands Meeting

Bob Mann


2021 Mid-Year Junior Associates Selection Round

George Beckett


Broker Workshop

I am old enough to remember when talks were given with the aid of an overhead projector and transparent acetate sheets written by hand. Since then Powerpoint and Keynote became the preferred medium, but it was quite different at the LSSTC enabling science 2021 broker workshop, where presentations merged with tutorials in a github page consisting of notebooks and markdown, all times in UTC because the 100 or so participants were all on different continents.

Ken Smith presented on behalf of LSST:UK: a number of notebooks on Google Colab, that use the new Lasair API. You can try them here, and read about the API here.

Since the Rubin Observatory is not yet operational, there is no LSST data, so most of the brokers are using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) as a prototype. ZTF delivers something like 2% to 4% of the expected data rate from LSST, partly because there are fewer transients, partly because the data packets are smaller than LSST.

The Alerce and ANTARES brokers are the big players, with significant resources from the Chilean and US governments. In Europe, there is the Fink from France, AMPEL from Germany, and Lasair from the UK. The variety of approaches shows the wisdom of the Rubin Observatory in outsourcing this aspect of the project to a wide community: some brokers have sophisticated classifiers of variable stars and transients, some expect users to write code, while other expect users to build SQL queries.

The life-cycle of a transient alert is emerging through consensus. The telescope makes a source detection and sends out an alert packet; a broker processes the packet and annotates it with context and classification, then the users of the broker are informed of alerts that satisfy their criteria. That user may be a machine, a so-called marshall system, that allows a group of scientists to share opinions, and the marshall may be connect to TOMS (Target and Observation Manager Software) that can initiate follow-up observation of the most interesting sources.

There were many technology innovations on display. As noted above, new ways to combine code, tutorial, and presentation; ways to build sustainable code with pre-commit git hooks and automated testing; Javascript tools for websites such as React/Redux; and authentication services via COManage. There was a discussion section on NoSQL databases, which promise scalability even with very large amounts of data.

Roy Williams


Recent LSST:UK outputs

LSST:UK has recently produced the following technical reports.

Title

Author

Description

Terry Sloan


Forthcoming meetings of interest

The global pandemic has led to almost all face-to-face meetings being cancelled. However, in light of continued restrictions on travel, Rubin Observatory business has moved online and we aim to maintain a list of relevant/ interesting upcoming meetings on our Confluence site.

George Beckett


  • No labels