Introduction
New data rights list posted at 2023 Affiliate PI and Junior Associate List
Save the date for PCW: https://community.lsst.org/t/rubin-pcw-2023-save-the-date/7472 . Marriott University Park in Tucson. “hope to make some sessions (plenaries and general-interest sessions) virtually accessible for those who cannot attend in person. “
Clarification of reason for CET changing to CST: https://community.lsst.org/t/name-change-rubin-community-science-team/7443/3
StarTracker cameras are beating down the TMA pointing uncertainty
Video of Wil and Ranpal being taken onto top of dome: https://rubin.canto.com/v/DigestPortal/album/HN2LC?from_main_library&display=curatedView&viewIndex=2&column=video&id=cnvmokm4it7jf3gbq1n2ffnl0k
Annual NSF/DOE Joint Operations Review. “a "yes" to all charge questions, many positive comments, and a very useful set of constructive recommendations to help guide future planning. “
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.
New Interface for the Lasair Alert Broker
Gareth Francis, Andy Lawrence, Terry Sloan, Stephen Smartt, Ken Smith, Roy Williams, Dave Young
Lasair is the UK community proker for LSST alerts -- the immediate notifications of changes in the night sky. Often these sources are the result of energetic processes, and the science knowledge from such sources is greatly improved by early follow-up -- with spectroscopy for example. Therefore the alert broker is designed so that end-users get data as soon as possible after the photons hit the Rubin telescope. Lasair can send emails to users -- the 20th century rapid alert -- or it can push messages via Kafka, a streaming protocol made for machine-to-machine communication. A Lasair user builds filters -- from fragments of SQL -- that pass through only what that user wants: perhaps a kilonova lightcurve, or an alert coincident with the user's personal catalogue.
There will be a lot of alerts from LSST, perhaps 10 million on an average night, each about 60 kilobytes, so up to a terabyte to be processed. The LSST alerts will have not just the latest detection of the lightcurve, but a year-long lightcurve. The Lasair architecture splits the firehose into substreams, each to its own processor, which can evaluate each alert against the user's stored filters.
Lasair adds value to the alerts before the filters run. "Sherlock" is a collection of catalogues of galaxies, AGN, variable stars, etc, and an intelligent algorithm to associate an alert with a known astrophysical object. There is also a crossmatch with the Transient Name Service to see if the alert has already been discovered and registered. Users can upload "watchlists" of their favourite objects, and "watchmaps" with regions of the sky, and include these as part of their filter.
Most of the other six LSST alert brokers are classification engines, so that alerts are labelled by foe example supernova type. But Lasair is a kit of parts for users to make their own filters and classifications, based on lightcurve "features", for example periodicity and rate of increase of flux. The filter can also include the sherlock information, for example redshift and colour of the host galaxy, and association with watchmap sources. Lasair users are encouraged to create "annotations" of objects in the database, where their classifications and derived features can be added to thos produced by Lasair itself.
Lasair has been prototyped for four years on the Palomar-ZTF survey, a preview in many ways to LSST. The Lasair team has been working on a new web interface for this finale ZTF version of Lasair, which was put into production March 14, before starting seriously on the LSST alerts that are soon to come. Please look through the new web pages and documentation.
Dummy heading for Chris and Mark
Christopher Frohmaier Mark Sullivan
Changes to the access to the Data Previews
Change to CIlogon for DP Delegates
Change to process of becoming DP0 delegate: https://community.lsst.org/t/the-current-process-for-new-delegates-no-more-applications/7452
Linking multiple IDs: https://rsp.lsst.io/guides/getting-started/linking-more-ids.html
Forthcoming meetings of interest
There are a number of meeting updates to report on this month. Please check-out the links below for more details.
The first announcement of the LSST@Europe 5 meeting has been made. The meeting will be held in Poreč, Croatia, during 25th--29th September 2023. Registration information is expected to be published by end of March 2023.
The dates have also been confirmed for the Rubin Project and Community Workshop 2023: it will be held on 7th--11th August in Tucson, Arizona. More details are expected in the coming weeks.
The IDAC coordinators (along with representatives from LSST:UK, LIneA, and the LINCC programme) are organising an IDAC workshop during 21st--22nd March 2023, entitled Supporting Computational Science with Rubin LSST. The workshop will be virtual and pre-signup is now available.
Other meetings of potential interest for the coming months include:
27th February – 3rd March: DESC Collaboration Meeting (virtual). Details to be published on DESC members website (login required).
24th - 28th July: DESC Collaboration Meeting (SLAC).
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 Forthcoming LSST-related Meetings .
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.