Introduction
News Digest 6/9/23: https://www.lsst.org/news/digest/06sept2023
Baseline 3.2 OpSim output released: https://community.lsst.org/t/baseline-v3-2-released/7877
Major integrations on the summit continued with the installation of the secondary mirror (M2) cell and surrogate mirror on the telescope mount on August 25th. The team, the procedures and the equipment were all well-prepared, and the process was carried out smoothly and safely. In the coming days the camera integrating structure with the Commissioning Camera (ComCam) will be reinstalled in the center of the newly-mounted M2 cell. Over the next several months, the team will resume dynamic testing of the TMA and all of the now-installed subsystems to verify that they are performing together in compliance with their specifications in their rotating and tilting locations on the telescope.
LINCC Framework call - https://www.lsstcorporation.org/lincc/content/incubator-call-proposals
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.
James Mullaney UK Tour 2023/24
Lasair Meetup at Oxford
The developers of the Lasair community broker have connected with the users of the system in a very productive face-to-face meeting in Oxford, Sept 13/14 (agenda here). Many email addresses and zoom pictures transformed into real people! /wiki/spaces/LUSC/pages/3224862723 is a community broker for the LSST alert stream, and the function of a broker is to filter the firehose of data into a stream of precisely what a user wants, and delivering it to them. Users are looking for exotic supernovae, kilonovae, tidal disruption events, exotic binaries in our galaxy, and other publication-worthy transients.
A first use was demonstrated of mining the ZTF database to lightcurves to discover more objects like AT2021lwx -- the most energetic non-quasar optical transient astronomical event ever observed (Wiseman++ 2023). The objects returned by a filter against Sherlock are examined lightcurve by lightcurve to find one rising slowly and fading slowly.
There were three talks on finding lensed supernovae, which use a watchlist of galaxy clusters to identify candidates -- their main request to the Lasair team was better access to the real-bogus score of detections, since a lensed source may be rather unlike the normal PSF.
Several users are using Lasair to return dozens of possibilities every day, and would like it to be easier to "eyeball" large numbers. Requests to the developers include a page where many lightcurves and cutouts can be seen together; also a list of veto objects that will not be seen again, so they don't need to be eyeballed again. These are just a few examples of productive discussion between users and developers, which will result is a more useful system for LSST. Challenges for the future include:
Transitioning from ZTF to LSST, with 30 times the alert numbers, while maintaining quality and performance;
Characterising light-curves through numerical features, that accurately capture the aspects users want;
Extending the scope of Lasair with new capabilities requested by users, as well as by including solar system objects.
Roy Williams
Recent LSST:UK Science Centre outputs
The LSST:UK Science Centre has recently produced the following technical reports.
Title | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|
Mike Read, George Beckett | In addition to the main LSST survey products and external ancillary survey datasets, the UK-DAC will host and serve data products generated by some of the UK work-packages. In LSST:UK Phase B, there are two such work-packages, WP3.11 (Cross matching and astrometry at LSST depths) and WP3.5 (LSST and near-infrared data fusion). The same infrastructure used for the LSST products is to be utilised, namely Qserv for the relational database and the data butler for the flat file products (images etc). The data will be accessed via the Rubin Science Platform. This document gives an overview of the steps involved in publishing data from these two work-packages and the next steps for this work. | |
Roy Williams. Gareth Francis, Andy Lawrence, Ken Smith, Stephen Smartt | Lasair Version 5 is a prototype running on LSST simulated alert data supplied by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This prototype LSST alert broker is located at https://lasair-lsst-dev.lsst.ac.uk. The schema of LSST alerts has many more components than the ZTF schema, and has a formal change system through a schema registry. This prototype has improved and automated handling of schema and schema evolution. The software for computing lightcurve features is much more modular and extensible, with comprehensive testing and debugging facilities. |
Forthcoming meetings of interest
Other meetings of potential interest for the coming months include:
Dates | Meeting Title/ Event | Meeting Website/ Contact | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|
11/Dec/23—15/Dec/23 | Unveiling the Dynamic Universe: Cosmic Streams in the Era of Rubin | Puerto Varas, Chile | |
16/Oct/23—20/Oct/23 | DESC Sprint Week | DESC Confluence (login required) | Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh |
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.