Rubin alerts and broker workshop - 14-15 January 2025 Oxford

We thank the Breakthough Listen team for generous support for the meeting. Breakthrough Listen are headquartered at the Department of Physics, University of Oxford.

Workshop dates : Tuesday 14 January (10:00, with coffee and chat from 09:30) until lunchtime on Wednesday 15 January 2025.

Local Organising Committee : Stephen Smartt, Heloise Stevance, James Gillanders, Shubham Srivastav, Cigdem Arnison, Ken Smith, Jack Tweddle

Scientific Organising Committee : The Lasair Team.

Location : Denys Wilkinson Building, Department of Physics, Keble Road, Oxford

Deadline for full registration (for dinner in Christ Church, and requesting a talk) was 15th December 2024 23:00 [Now Closed and full].

Final deadline for registration for workshop attendance: 5th January 2025 [Now closed and full]

Eric Bellm from the Rubin Data Management team will visit Oxford from Monday January 13th to Thursday January 16th. The Lasair Team will host a workshop around Eric’s visit to discuss the latest news on LSST alerts and broker provision.

The workshop will run from Tuesday 14th January (10:00, with coffee and chat from 09:30) until Lunchtime on Wednesday 15th. Lunch is provided both days and there is no registration fee.

Eric leads the team at the University of Washington who are building the real-time data processing pipelines for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. He is the Alert Production Science lead and is also the Survey Scientist for the Zwicky Transient Facility. With ComCam on the Simonyi telescope now and observing the sky, and LSSTCam to come in early 2025, this LSST:UK community workshop will discuss the latest updates from the Rubin Data Management team. This will inform our final development stage for the Lasair broker as we approach the start of LSST alerts in 2025.

We encourage in person attendance at the event to discuss what we can jointly achieve between the Rubin Alert Production team and the brokers.

We will make provision for hybrid attendance. Personnel from other brokers are very welcome to attend, although our timing will be most suited to European time zones (two mornings GMT).

Registration

By signing up for attendance, you must explicitly accept to abide by the LSST:UK Code of Conduct, and write YES in the box blow. Please read this document before accepting.

LSST:UK Contact Persons for this meeting for CoC issues : Cosimo Inserra and Aprajita Vera.

Registration form and acceptance of the CoC is here : (deadline for registration if you want to attend dinner is 15th December 23:00)

Programme

The programme for Tuesday and Wednesday is available on this page.

Useful links

SOC Page for organisation (restricted)

Lasair Users Group

We will host the second meeting of the Lasair Users Group on the afternoon of the Wednesday 15th January.

Wednesday afternoon and Thursday - unconference sessions

Eric and the Lasair team will be around for informal discussions on Wednesday and Thursday. You are welcome to stay a little longer if you want to interact with the team. Contact us and let us know if you plan to do so.

Accommodation Options :

University Rooms

Linton Lodge

Easy Hotel Oxford

Discussion items and questions

To make best use of our discussion time, we encourage you to ask questions and highlight discussion items in advance. With LSST data approaching, there may be many technical and detailed questions, that we would be happy to answer. Please add below

Protoyping
1. Will we see any example alerts coming from re-processed ComCam data, in the same schema as the LSSTCam alerts?
2. Is there another operations rehearsal coming up?
diaObject schema
1. Will there be a major update of schema from 7.1?
2. Will there be the date of its first ever diaSource? For an SSObject, there will be the field firstObservationDate - this is very useful for every diaObject. See forum discussion.
3. Can we have sample alerts with these features from APDB computed?
4. How was the list of diaObject attributes decided?
Alert characteristics
1. What will be the pixel size of cutout images? All the same size?
2. How many diaForcedSources / diaNonDetectionLimits can we expect per alert?
3. For how long will forced photometry run below 5 sigma ?
How does the real-bogus separation work with LSST? How will it be trained and what information will be provided on the reliability and the results of training, testing and verification ?
Prompt Products Database
1. Will it be possible to pull a few (10-100) forced photometry data records from the PPDB each day? If so, will it be a TAP service?
Archive
1. Lasair will keep only the latest 3 months of cutouts. Can we get cutouts from LSST? If so, What is the nature of the request and response ?
Can the diaSources come with a label of the sky area that they fall in ? e.g. Low-dust WFD, Dusty Plane, DDF-COSMOS, SMC, LMC, SCP etc