Announcements

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.

23 September 2016: Project News A two-day Operations Planning Workshop is taking place this week project-wide, with primary sites of participation including Tucson, SLAC, NCSA, and the University of Washington. This workshop is part of an operations planning sprint, in preparation for an LSST-commissioned review of its operations plan at the beginning of November. The AURA Management Council for LSST (AMCL) met last week in Tucson to hear updates on project status, and to discuss the Data Management re-planning effort, operations planning, and LSST governance during operations. Beth Willman will represent LSST at next week’s AURA Board of Directors meeting taking place next week in Boulder, CO. Updates on each AURA facility (Gemini, LSST, NOAO, NSO, STScI) will be complimented by discussions on topics such as data science at AURA centers. Project Manager Victor Krabbendam will be in Chile next week to review progress on the summit. The Cerro Pachón webcam shows progress …

20 September 2016: Astronomers studying a mysterious phenomenon known as Lyman-alpha blobs (LABs) have discovered several of these high-energy objects in galaxies that are much closer than previously known. The discovery is significant because these closer specimens are much easier to study, and because they live at a time when the Universe was much older and more mature, allowing astronomers to study their evolution with cosmic time. The observations are of a rare type of relatively nearby galaxy, engulfed in large clouds of ionized gas as a result of violent, energetic activity in their cores. These closer specimens were first described in 2013, catching the astronomers’ attention with their luminosities and sizes. Data taken with the Gemini Observatory quickly revealed that these galaxies are unparalleled by any other objects known in the nearby Universe. To understand their nature and formation, observations with the Chandra X-ray observatory, the GALEX UV satellite, and the mid-infrared …

19 September 2016: The red color near the north pole of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, originates on Pluto. Once a mystery, it now appears that the red color of “Mordor Macula” arises as methane gas escapes from Pluto’s atmosphere and freezes onto the icy surface of Charon’s north pole. UV light from the Sun then transforms the methane into reddish organic materials. The New Horizons team that reported this result includes NOAO astronomer Tod Lauer.

16 September 2016: Project News Members of the Tucson-based Data Management team participated remotely in the NCSA monthly software engineering seminar this week. Their presentations have been uploaded to the Zenodo LSST DM Community and are available to anyone interested: Let's Talk About Docs by Jonathan Sick LSST Data Management Software Development by Tim Jenness. LSST hosted a fun and productive Citizen Science Summit this past week with multiple guests, including: Chris Lintott and Laura Trouille (Zooniverse), Jennifer Shirk (Citizen Science Association), Rob Semper (Exploratorium), Sander Dieleman (Google DeepMind), Jeff Carlin (LSST), and many more. Ideas and notes were captured on both the Community site and Google Docs. LSST EPO looks forward to continuing the conversation and building relationships with the citizen science community in the years to come! With the Early Registration Deadline of September 25th approaching, we remind you of three LSST-related events taking place at the January 2017 meeting of …

12 September 2016: Astronomers have discovered ultra-faint stellar systems in the direction of the Sagittarius stream, the stream of stars that is being pulled out of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy as it orbits our own Milky Way galaxy. Similar in size to globular clusters but much fainter, the new stellar systems straddle the fuzzy boundary between dwarf galaxies and stellar clusters. The discovery was made by a team of astronomers using data from the Dark Energy Survey being carried out at CTIO. Team members include NOAO astronomers Kathy Vivas, Tim Abbott, David James, Chris Smith, and Alistair Walker.