This month saw the sixth LSST@Europe conference, hosted by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) on La Palma.

The programme featured the usual mix of Rubin status updates, talks about in-kind contributions and sessions organised by each of the LSST Science Collaborations. The conference had about 130 in-person attendees, with a further 30+ joining online. Once again, LSST:UK was well represented amongst session organisers, speakers and attendees. @Tom J Wilson and @Sugata Kaviraj present their summaries below, while copies of presentation slides are being posted in a Zenodo collection.

Remaining in meeting mode, this month will see an RAS Specialist Discussion Meeting entitled Black holes and AGN in the era of the Event Horizon Telescope, JWST and the Rubin Observatory, which may be of interest to many. It will be held on Friday 11 October at Burlington House and is being organised by @James Mullaney and Derek Ward-Thomson, with Matthew Temple presenting an invited talk on AGN Science in the Rubin Observatory's LSST. Applications for contributed talks and posters may be submitted via a Google Form(Abstract Submission for October RAS Meeting).

The next call for stage-one proposals for LINCC Incubator projects falls on 15 October. To remind you, the stated “goal of the Incubator Program is to engage the scientific community in the creation of software tools that support the community’s analysis of Rubin LSST data”. To that end, funding is provided for applicants to work with software engineers from the LINCC Frameworks team to enhance software tools so that they can be readily used by the wider community. Previous Incubator awardees include @Meg Schwamb and @Tom J Wilson, both of whom have spoken very positively of the experience of working with the LINCC team.

Finally, a reminder that the LSST:UK Fantasy Premier League started last week; there is still time for others to join, given that there are a further 30+ gameweeks to come this season. Instructions on setting up a team can be found on the FPL website, and the code to join the LSST:UK league is 0ib5xp. Fantasy football may not be to everyone’s taste, so please let me know if you can think of other social activities that we could launch within the LSST:UK Consortium and advertise via our monthly newsletters.

@Bob Mann

The Spanish island of La Palma was the setting for LSST@Europe6, which took place from 16-20 September 2024. The conference began with a series of updates from Rubin team members on construction, survey plans, and status updates. The telescope is nearly built, with one final albeit crucial part to install: the M1M3 mirror!

After that the telescope will officially begin commissioning over the coming months, with various timelines given for First Photon, First Light, Data Previews (DPs) 1 and 2, and then survey start and Data Release 1 (DR1). As always, check the Monthly Updates for the latest figures, which should have been, or will imminently be, updated at time of reading. Emphasis was put on early science and getting ahead of the curve: don't wait until DP1 is released to sign up for any needed accounts on the Rubin Science Platform and elsewhere, you can (and should) be doing so now. DP0 is ready and available to be getting to grips with, and there's only a finite amount of human-bandwidth for processing new signups that might cause a wait in accessing DP1 if you delay! Otherwise the repeated message was one of how close we are to realising the goal: Bob Blum summarised it as "we've waited 20 years, what's a few more months?" but also warned people not to get distracted or risk missing key milestones, expected to go past very quickly through the end of this year into 2025.

A large update came from the Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC), releasing V3.6 of the survey strategy via Rubin Technote PSTN-056. Updates were small but significant, and include changes to filter exposure times and relative exposure number due to mirror coating changes, a recommendation to adopt the "one-snap" approach to exposures, and a tweak to the rolling cadence schedule to produce so-called ‘uniform’ releases in years 4 and 7 in addition to the final data release. Additionally, telescope time in-kind contributions through NOIRLab are becoming available starting with semester 2025A, and the in-kind contribution session clarified that Junior Associate (JA) status has a grace period for observers who move institutions or start permanent roles, avoiding sudden loss of data access for early- and mid-career researchers. Finally on the operations side of things, there was a much-needed discussion of the Independent Data Access Centers (IDACs) and their role in the serving and analysis of data, with discussions around whether the DACs are meeting community needs, what hardware the community requires, and what datasets – either Rubin-generated or from an in-kind contribution – each IDAC will host.

In a similar vein, a lot of focus in the Science Collaboration (SC) sessions was on anything but science – highlighted, for me, by the Transient and Variable Star (TVS) SC session, where the specifics of algorithms, but, even more fundamentally, compute resources and GPUs dominated the discussion times. The SC stressed the need for GPUs to speed up a much-wider range of problems (such as light-curve period finding) than perhaps are ‘traditionally’ considered for such hardware, like training sets for cosmological classifiers. A plea for IDACs offering GPU time as well as hosting light-curves (and, ideally, raw images) was the over-arching conclusion there. A welcome addition to the schedule, the dedicated Machine Learning Across The SCs session summarised current work, but left a lot of open questions on topics like algorithms, data access, hardware access, interpretability of results, and validity of extrapolating from one regime to another.

On the non-Rubin side of things, the island of La Palma featured heavily in the conference as you'd expect, both through plenaries and excursions. The first plenary talk was on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), a 10-metre optical telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory. 2400 metres above sea level, it provides a wide range of imaging and spectroscopic capabilities and offers a fraction of observing nights as an in-kind contribution. The GTC was also part of one of the excursions, which offered a tour of the facility in addition to a trip to the mountain summit and a look around one of the new Gamma-ray Cherenkov telescopes being built at the Observatory, the Large-Sized Telescope 1 (no one should let astronomers name things!).

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), following in the footsteps of the MAGIC telescopes, with its Large-, Medium-, and Small-Sized Telescopes (well, at least we're consistent), will detect the Cherenkov radiation produced when Gamma rays strike the upper atmosphere, to higher precision and energies than any previous telescope, once construction is complete. On a completely different note, the second excursion and plenary talk literally featured the island itself, with a talk on and a visit to the 2021 volcanic eruption, with lava flows creating new land for the island but also disrupting thousands of lives.

@Tom J Wilson

La Palma’s Gran Telescopio Canarias, on the right, provides a wide range of imaging and spectroscopic capabilities. Credit: Tom Wilson.

A view of the impact of the 2021 eruption, including the new small cone that formed and new lava fields. Credit: Tom Wilson.

Extra-galactic science had a strong showing at LSST@Europe 6, with members of the Galaxies Science Collaboration (SC) presenting their work across 26 talks in three parallel sessions.

As has become customary in such sessions, the talk schedule spanned a diverse range of topics, ranging from low surface brightness science at all spatial scales, galaxy structure, AGN and the estimation of physical parameters using techniques like SED fitting. Members of the Galaxies SC organised two additional parallel sessions – one on the applications of machine learning across all Rubin SCs, and one that brought together Data Management and the community to discuss the ongoing efforts (led primarily by LSST:UK members) to ensure that the Rubin pipeline preserves low surface brightness flux and enables access to LSST's significant discovery space in this regime. 

Past LSST:UK work has quantified the effective surface brightness limit, and the resultant loss in discovery science, that would result from using aggressive sky subtraction techniques of the kind that has been employed in recent HSC surveys. Significant progress has also been made in constructing algorithms and pipeline setups that mitigate this issue and preserve low surface brightness flux.

However, Data Management's goal of having one data product serve the needs of all science cases means that further work is required, both to improve image quality and then to significantly improve the deblending process in order to enable accurate object detection in low-surface-brightness friendly images. The discussions between Data Management and the community at this session will prove useful in determining the future direction of these efforts.

@Sugata Kaviraj

Good science communications skills are valuable and transferable. They help others understand the value of your work, whether you’re interacting with the public, science peers, funders or future employers. In addition to informing and inspiring others, science communication can lead to change in behaviours and even policy.

The first of our LSST:UK communications workshops is for early career researchers. Its aim is to help participants efficiently and effectively share important details about their work and consider how they can increase the impact of their communication.

 Science communication: an introduction for early career researchers

This one-hour online session is aimed at those with little experience in science communication. It highlights how enhancing these skills is a pathway to increasing the impact of your research. It will help you tailor messages to your audience and work effectively with press officers.

The session also looks at areas in which attendees might wish to develop further skills, such as writing/collaborating on press releases, article writing (for outlets such as The Conversation), press/media interviews and social media. These platforms will be covered in more detail in future sessions.  

Understanding how to prioritise your messages and communicate in an engaging style are skills that will help you throughout your career – in academia and beyond. If you're new to communicating your work and interested in becoming a more effective communicator, don't miss this session.

Session topics 

• Why understanding your audience is key • Setting communication goals • Using clear and engaging language • Working with your institutional press office • Finding your communications platform.

Date and time

Tuesday 12 November 12.00-13.00 | Online (Zoom)

How to register

Sign up via Microsoft Forms

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will break ground for multi-messenger astronomy – that’s the message in the latest science release from Rubin.

Photons, neutrinos, cosmic rays and gravitational waves all carry information about the Universe. Multi-messenger astronomy brings together these four signals to investigate astronomical events from multiple cosmic perspectives.

Thanks to its sensitive camera and suite of filters, Rubin is set to increase the population of known multi-messenger sources by obtaining crucial colour information and localising events for follow-up observations by other telescopes.

To date, only one multi-messenger gravitational wave event has been observed: a merger between two neutron stars.

Read the full release: NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory’s Unparalleled Vision Will Revolutionize Multi-Messenger Astronomy

@Eleanor O'Kane

Latest LSST:UK Team meeting held

Secondary mirror cleaned for first time

The latest LSST:UK Team Meeting took place online on 26 September, with participants joining from across the work packages.

@Aaron Watkins and @Tom J Wilson provided a round-up of LSST@Europe6. It was a meeting of firsts and lasts. @Graham Smith presented for the first time in his new role as LSST:UK Project Scientist. We also said goodbye to two team members, @Amanda Ibsen and @Daniel Philip Weatherill. We wish them well in their respective new roles.

Following its installation on the telescope, Rubin Observatory's secondary mirror was cleaned for the first time on 29 August (see right).

In a process known as CO2 snow cleaning, high-velocity carbon dioxide was used to dislodge and remove dust and other debris. The process, widely used in optical applications, does not damage the sensitive mirror surface or leave any residue.

Watch the video

Read the full article: A Movie Camera for the Cosmos

Online science publication Nautilus Magazine has underlined the UK’s involvement in the Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

The piece, A Movie Camera for the Cosmos, features quotes from several astronomers, including @Bob Mann.

“We have had wide sky surveys before [and] we have had surveys that go very deep in small regions of sky,” said @Bob Mann in the article. “But this dataset will have an unprecedented combination of depth, spectral and areal coverage, and temporal resolution.”