Announcements

9 January 2017: Artificial light at night is a threat to astronomical research, personal safety, and the health of humans and wildlife. To address the challenge posed by the proliferating use of LEDs for billboards and street lighting, NOAO, in partnership with other concerned organizations, recently convened a workshop to showcase successful strategies for reducing light pollution. The workshop was held at the January meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) where the AAS Council announced a three-part resolution on light pollution, including calling on all AAS members to protect dark skies in their communities.

29 December 2016: Dr. Vera Rubin began observing at Kitt Peak National Observatory in 1963 at the 36-inch telescope. With her colleague Kent Ford, she continued using the Kitt Peak 2.1-m, accumulating over 60 galaxy rotation curves over the following years. Flat rotation curves were directly visible from the spectra: these data provided compelling observational evidence for a new kind of matter in the Universe, “dark matter”. Vera Rubin continued observing at Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo throughout her long career, and will be greatly missed by the entire NOAO science staff, the mountain technical staff, and everyone who had the good fortune to meet her.

16 December 2016: Project News AURA’s Workforce and Diversity Committee (WDC) met in Tucson this week, bringing together Human Resources representatives, external experts, and the Diversity Advocates at each AURA center: Gemini, LSST, NOAO, NSO, and STScI. The group works on issues relevant to building and maintaining a diverse workforce where individuals feel empowered to bring their perspectives, ideas, and approaches to AURA centers. [Read More.] A film crew from NCSA visited Tucson this week, recording interviews and background footage for a documentary about DES and LSST. This is part of the larger NSF-funded CADENS project to help explain and increase literacy about Digitally Enabled Science. LSST Deputy Director B. Willman was interviewed for the documentary, as were LSST science collaboration members T. Matheson (NOAO) and D. Norman (NOAO). The crew also visited Arizona Optical Services to film polishing of the LSST Camera lenses. A heads up for LSST team members that our …

13 December 2016: Using spectroscopic data from the Gemini North telescope, researchers have probed a complex binary T Tauri system that hints at a hidden planetary body shrouded deep within a stellar environment at the late stages of formation. Nicole Arulanantham of Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut, now at University of Colorado Boulder) and colleagues used the Gemini Near-InfraRed Spectrograph (GNIRS) on the Gemini North telescope to target the binary T Tauri system V582 Mon (KH 15D) — two K-type stars in a circumbinary ring that is inclined to the binary’s orbit. The team obtained data at three different orientations of the system’s two young stars, allowing them to study several key aspects of this complicated system — including characterising the photosphere and magnetosphere of the companion star (B), exploring a jet of material associated with a bipolar outflow, and probing the scattering properties of its circumbinary ring. The research uncovered an excess of …

9 December 2016: Project News The LSST Camera achieved a major milestone this week: the Science Raft team, located primarily at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), has constructed the very first Science Raft Tower Module populated with a full array of 9 CCDs and 3 Raft Electronics Boards. Full story with images can be found here. A fundamental requirement of the LSST Education and Public Outreach (EPO) program is to develop products that users actually want and need. Since technology and user tastes change over time, we have been encouraged to refresh the body of work that resulted in the EPO Baseline Design approved at our Final Design Review in December of 2013. To lay the groundwork for that effort, a workshop took place in Tucson this week to initiate a follow-up needs assessment. A broad group of participants will work with a consultant firm over the next ten weeks to perform an analysis …

2 December 2016: Project News LSST Deputy Director Beth Willman participated in the 6th Subaru International Conference in Hiroshima, Japan, November 28 – December 02, 2016. Beth presented first results and predictions for a Subaru/HSC observational program to comprehensively map LMC stellar mass galaxies at distances of ~2- 4 Mpc., highlighting some challenges encountered and lessons learned as data is being processed through a prototype LSST pipeline. Five members of the T&S team traveled to Dresden to participate in the LSST Coating Plant PDR review on Nov 29th-Dec 2nd. You can read more about the review and the custom magnetron in this week’s blog. With an eye on commissioning planning, project members from Data Management and the Systems Engineering Team will be in Seattle, December 5th- 8th for a Data Management Commissioning Plan Workshop being held at the University of Washington. Corporation News The LSST Corporation's Enabling Science Committee is soliciting funding proposals …

18 November 2016: Project News Project Scientist Zeljko Ivezic and Data Management team member Meredith Rawls, both astronomers at the University of Washington, along with David Ciardi, the science lead for LSST’s Science User Interface Team (SUIT) from IPAC, all participated in the 105th Meeting of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) in Boston, MA, November 10 – 12, 2017. The theme of this year’s meeting was The AAVSO's Role in the Age of Large Surveys. Read more. Many team members were involved in an internal review this week of the Telescope &Site assembly, integration, and verification plans. This review is looking at the integration and test process for the Telescope and Site subsystem, including the flow from established requirements to verification test plans, and the equipment and test processes used for verification. NETWORK CHAOS: Next Friday, November 25th, the IT staff in Tucson will be upgrading the backbone Ethernet switch …

15 November 2016: The DECam Legacy Survey (DECaLS) has released reduced images and source catalogs covering between 4000 and 8000 square degrees of sky in three wavelength bands. Dive into survey images and explore the Universe with the survey’s Imagine Sky Viewer. DECaLS, which is being carried out on the CTIO Blanco telescope, is one of three public surveys that will jointly image 14,000 square degrees of sky to provide targets for the upcoming Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument cosmology project at the Kitt Peak Mayall telescope.

11 November 2016: Project News An LSST-commissioned review of the LSST Operations Plan took place last week in Tucson. The Review Panel was charged to assess the current state of the Plan for its comprehensiveness, appropriateness and adequacy in meeting the operational requirements of the LSST system. Over 2.5 days, LSST team members presented details of the draft plan to a panel of 15 reviewers with diverse experience in the management and operations of astronomical facilities, high energy physics experiments, and major data centers. The review resulted in a set of insightful and productive recommendations for the team to consider as they complete this stage of the LSST Operations Plan development. This careful planning is in preparation for a proposal to be submitted to the NSF and DOE in 2017. Bill Gressler, our Project Manager for Telescope & Site, was in Chile last week and returned with a full report of activity on …

4 November 2016: Project News The SLAC Communications Team has unveiled their new multi-media website featuring the LSST Camera. Four engineers from LSST attended the Society of Women Engineers meeting in Philadelphia, PA, last week. This meeting brought together 5000 individuals for professional and personal development. Read more. The next LSST Joint Technical Meeting will take place March 6, 7, & 8 in Pasadena, CA, hosted by the IPAC group at Caltech/IPAC. This annual meeting brings the technical teams together for cross-cutting discussion including interfaces, integration, commissioning, and operations. In anticipation of starting construction on the Base Facility on the La Serena Recinto, a webpage with up-to-date news has gone live at https://project.lsst.org/base-facility/. Astronomy enthusiasts in Seattle learn about LSST at this recent AstroOnTap event. AstroOnTap is a monthly astronomy outreach event organized and produced solely by the UW Astro grad students. Daylight Savings Time (DST) ends at 2am this coming Sunday, November …

28 October 2016: Project News Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, has teamed up with two Princeton professors, LSST Science Advisory Committee chair Michael Strauss and J. Richard Gott, to discuss fundamental questions about the birth of the Universe and the latest discoveries by modern astrophysicists in their new book Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour. LSST is mentioned in this October 26th interview about the book, produced by WNYC. An LSST Workshop and Solar System Science Collaboration Meeting took place @DPS 48 / EPSC 11, in Pasadena, CA, last week. A summary and pictures can be found here. Efforts in all areas of the project are coming together and leading toward operations. Hardware integration has begun on the summit as reported last week. A Telescope Assembly Integration and Verification Plan review will take place in Tucson next week, to examine planning for the period after contractors have finished …

26 October 2016: Summary: A team using the Gemini Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics System (GeMS) with the Gemini South Adaptive Optics Imager (GSAOI) have, for the first time, measured the stellar masses relative to the physical sizes of several galaxies in a cluster at a lookback time of about 5 billion years. The data suggest that the relationship between stellar mass and size has a constant slope over time. This leads to the conclusion that the most likely evolutionary course for the larger (more expansive) galaxies we see in the nearby Universe is either from the combination of smaller galaxies and/or outflows from black holes at galactic cores. During the past 20 years astronomers have developed a picture for the evolution of the size and structure of galaxies – from the formation of the first galaxies in the early Universe, to what we see today. One of the most important discoveries is that the …

24 October 2016: A recent community-based study takes a science-driven look at the question “What supporting OIR capabilities will be needed to maximize the science enabled by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)?” The study report quantifies needed capabilities and highlights ways that existing, planned, and future resources can be positioned to accomplish community science goals.

21 October 2016: Project News Project progress this week included: A status review for the Operations Control Software and Telescope Control Software is taking place this week in Tucson; the L2 camera lens has entered the fine grinding stage; the SDSS Stripe 82 data has been staged into the prototype Data Access Center (DAC) storage area at NCSA to enable early tests of the LSST DAC; and the first LSST hardware integration between vendors is taking place on Cerro Pachón, a major milestone! Twenty-nine LSST proceedings papers from the 2016 SPIE meeting on Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation in Edinburgh have been added to the public website on the Publications page. Search “All Project and Science Publications” by type “SPIE” to view a linked list of the documents. Last week President Obama hosted the 2016 White House Frontiers Conference, a national convening co-hosted with (LSSTC Institutional Members) the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon …

20 October 2016: Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active world in our Solar System. Now, the longest series of frequent high-resolution tracking of Io’s thermal emission is providing insights on Io’s volcanoes thanks to a powerful joint observation program between the Gemini North telescope (with NIRI+Altair instrument) and the W.M. Keck Observatory. The observations use advanced adaptive optics technology to remove distortions caused by the Earth’s atmosphere and provide remarkably sharp imaging of Io’s volcanic activity over a period of 29 months. The results show patterns in the volcanic activity over time and location on the satellite, but also present many new questions. Compellingly, some of the eruptions appeared to progress across the surface over time, as if one somehow triggered another 500 kilometers away. According to University of California Berkeley (UCB) Graduate Student Katherine de Kleer, "While it stretches the imagination to devise a mechanism that could operate over distances …

14 October 2016: Project News The LSST Science Advisory Committee has posted a series of recommendations to the LSST Project Office, on topics including the decision-making process for deciding on the LSST cadence and the selection of deep-drilling fields. Also available are presentations to the SAC concerning the above topics, as well as the LSST Science User Interface and an MSIP-funded program led by the Las Cumbres Observatory. CCD acceptance testing continues at Brookhaven National Laboratory using one of the two single-sensor electro-optical test stands. A priority of the project is to accumulate enough sensors to begin performance-testing of the science-raft tower module. A workshop titled “Getting to Know the LSST” will take place at next week’s AAS/DPS meeting. Deputy Director Beth Willman will present a summary and status of LSST at the workshop, which has been scheduled on Monday, 17 October from 4:30 to 6:30pm in Ballroom C at the Pasadena Convention …

11 October 2016: Studies of a distant corner of the Universe, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed distant galaxies rich in molecular gas. Their high gas content likely fueled the high rate of star formation during the “Golden Age” of galaxy formation 10 billion years ago. The discovery was made by international team of astronomers, including NOAO astronomer Mark Dickinson.

7 October 2016: Project News The LSST Communications Code of Conduct (CoC) was posted this week on our public website Participation Page. It provides guidelines for those using the LSST communication tools, specifically the Community Forum and the Slack instant messaging application, coming soon. The CoC will help achieve our goal of promoting effective communication between the project and the broad science community. LSST welcomes passionate, detailed, thoughtful disagreement, and discussion of ideas within an inclusive, collaborative environment. The report from the May 2016 Kavli Futures workshop on "Maximizing Science in the Era of LSST" is available for download here. This study, funded by The Kavli Foundation and endorsed by NSF/AST, quantifies and prioritizes the supporting capabilities needed to maximize the science enabled by LSST. A popular poster that LSST has used at several meetings is now available for download in several sizes. It illustrates four aspects of LSST: Science Discovery, Big Data, …

30 September 2016: Project News Building the LSST takes a lot of engineering and steel, much of which is coming together in Tucson, AZ. A variety of local vendors, from the heavy-metal experts at CAID Industries to the electronics assemblers at Beacon Group, have a piece of the action. Read how LSST contributes to the local economy in this September 25th Arizona Daily Star article. The LSST Project’s second project capturing a “Day in the Life of LSST Construction” will take place on October 20, 2016. Our previous production from March 2016 can be seen here, showing the variety of skills that goes into building the LSST as well as the people who do the work. LSST Systems Administrator Iain Goodenow will be out of the office the entire month of October, and not available by phone or email. During October and always, remember to send email to lsst-sysadmins@lsst.org rather than a specific …

29 September 2016: Beginning in 2017, open access time on the LCO global telescope network will be available to the US community through the NOAO TAC. The LCO network includes nine 1m and two 2m optical telescopes that are optimized for time-domain studies. A call for proposals will be issued by NOAO early next year.