Introduction
The Rubin Education and Public Outreach (EPO) programme transitioned from Construction to Operations a few months ago, with a big splash, including the launch of a new, public-facing website (rubinobservatory.org); for the time being, at least, the links in the “For Scientists” section of the new site point back to the old lsst.org site, so that will remain the more useful of the two websites for us for the moment.
An outline programme has been published for the 2023 Project and Community Workshop (PCW). The meeting has reached its in-person capacity, but there is a waiting list accessible through the in-person registration page, while virtual registration remains open (although not all sessions will support remote attendance).
A number of the staff working within the LSST:UK Science Centre (LUSC) programme at Edinburgh are from EPCC, rather than the Institute for Astronomy, and they are preparing a series of articles for the EPCC website summarising their work. In the first of these, Dominic Sloan-Murphy describes his work with Tom Wilson and Tim Naylor to parallelise the Macauff catalogue cross-matching software, providing a slightly more technical account of that collaboration than was presented in the news item that the three of them wrote for the December/January Newsletter.
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.
Executive Group elections
Following recent elections, we are delighted to welcome two new members - Sarah Casewell and Matt Nicholl - to the Exec Group.
Sarah is an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow and lecturer at the University of Leicester, where she is also co-chair of the Women’s Staff Forum. She is an observational astronomer working on brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, exoplanets and low mass binary systems. She is a member of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) consortium and an ESA community scientist for the Ariel mission. Sarah has been an LSST:UK point of contact for the solar neighbourhood and is now the point of contact for variable stars.
Matt is a Reader in Astrophysics at Queen’s University Belfast, with previous experience at Birmingham, Edinburgh and Harvard. He is interested in the diversity of astrophysical transients and in particular how compact objects (neutron stars and black holes) provide the engines behind some of the rarest and most energetic events in the Universe, such as tidal disruption events, superluminous supernovae, and gravitational wave sources. He currently leads a project to harness the power of Rubin alerts and must-messenger searches, using machine learning transient classification and spectroscopic/multi-wavelength follow-up.
Matt and Sarah were elected by the LSST:UK Consortium Board to replace Catherine Heymans and Aprajita Verma who had both stood down at the end of their Exec Group terms. We thank all those who stood in these elections and, especially, thank Catherine and Aprajita for the valuable input that they have provided during the past three years. Aprajita has kindly agreed to continue attending Exec Group meetings in a new ex officio role associated with her position as leader of the Rubin In-Kind Program Coordination team. Matt and Sarah join Cosimo Inserra, Richard McMahon and Kathy Romer as the five elected members of the Exec. Exec Group meetings are also attended by Mike Watson (Consortium Board Chair), Graham Smith (Commissioning Coordinator), Stephen Smartt (Project Scientist), George Beckett and Terry Sloan (Project Managers), plus myself, as Project Leader and Exec Group Chair.
Dummy header for David and Boris
David Alonso and Boris Leistedt
LSST:UK session at NAM2023
The schedule has been published for our three sessions at NAM2023. It reads as follows:
Date | Time | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
Thursday, July 6 | 16.00 | Bob Mann (Edinburgh) | UK involvement in the LSST |
16.12 | Bob Blum (Rubin) | Rubin Observatory update | |
16.38 | Christina Williams (NOIRLab) | Community Science update | |
16.55 | Ashley Villar (Harvard) | LSST Science Collaborations | |
17.12 | George Beckett (Edinburgh) | Delivering a UK Independent Data Access Centre for LSST | |
Friday, July 7 | 09.00 | James Mullaney (Sheffield) | LSST Data Release Processing: what, when, where and the UK’s involvement |
09.12 | Manda Banerji (Southampton) | The HSC-VISTA fusion dataset and prospects for LSST+VISTA extragalactic science | |
09.24 | Tom Wilson (Exeter) | Enabling early Rubin science with robust cross-matches in the crowded LSST sky | |
09.36 | Chris Frohmaier (Southampton) | LSST and the Time-Domain Extragalactic Survey (TiDES) | |
09.48 | Aaron Watkins (Herts) | Modifying the HSC pipeline sky-subtraction algoithms for low-surface-brightness science with LSST | |
10.00 | Sugata Kaviraj (Herts) | Dwarf galaxies in deep-wide surveys like LSST: a new frontier in the study of galaxy evolution | |
10.12 | Madison Walder (Surrey) | Probing the dark matter haloes of external galaxies by modelling stellar streams | |
14.15 | Mike Walmsley (Manchester) | Galaxy Zoo for LSST | |
14.27 | Adam McMaster (Open U) | Black hole hunters: a microlensing search for quiescent black holes | |
14.39 | Francesco Petri (Imperial) | Inferring cosmology using Lyman-break galaxies from Rubin | |
14.51 | Naomi Robertson (Edinburgh) | The interplay between different analysis choices for LSST-Y1 cosmic shear | |
15.03 | Isabelle Ye (Manchester) | Detecting the Doppler magnification dipole from LSST images | |
15.17 | Sebastian von Hausegger (Oxford) | Testing the cosmological principle with Rubin | |
15.29 | Suhail Dhawan (Cambridge) | Strongly lensed supernovae: discovery to cosmology in the LSST ear |
There will also be one poster associated with this session. It is entitled Tensorised Analytic Marginalisation over Tomographic Redshift Distribution for Accurate and Efficient Cosmic Inference and will be presented by Yunhao Zhang (Edinburgh).
Recent LSST:UK Science Centre outputs
The LSST:UK Science Centre has recently produced the following technical reports.
Title | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|
Forthcoming meetings of interest
There is a busy schedule of potentially interesting meetings in the coming months. Registration is now open for the National Astronomy Meeting, in Cardiff, during 3rd--7th July (http://nam2023.org ) at which LSST:UK will run three sessions (see above). The website for the Rubin Project and Community Workshop 2023 is now available, with options to suggest sessions and to contribute a poster or talk abstract. Earlier in the Summer, Rubin Data Delegates might be interested to join the DP0 Virtual Summer School (online, 12th–16th June).
Other meetings of potential interest for the coming months include:
3rd-7th July: The National Astronomy Meeting 2023, held in Cardiff, with a three-part session on “UK involvement in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory: Legacy Survey of Space and Time”
24th–28th July: DESC Collaboration Meeting (SLAC), California, USA
24th–28th July: ZTF Summer School, University of Minnesota/ virtual
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.