rubinann16025 — Announcement

Rubin Digest 15 July 2016

15 July 2016

Project News

Registration for LSST2016 stands at over 200, with deadlines for both registration and access to the LSST discounted hotel block extended one week and closing on July 22nd.  Registration page is here.

Telescope & Site Manager Bill Gressler is traveling this week, first visiting Harris in Rochester, NY for the monthly status review on the secondary mirror and mirror cell, and then to PFlow Industry in Oak Creek, WI, for final acceptance testing of the Pflow vertical lift, the big “elevator” that will be used to transport the LSST primary/tertiary mirror from the observing floor to the maintenance area in the summit facility building. 

A number of science grade sensors have been received by the camera team and are undergoing acceptance testing at BNL. In addition, two reviews take place at SLAC next week including a corner raft Manufacturing Readiness Review.

Data Management: Version 12.0 of the LSST software stack has been released.  This release features implementations of algorithms originally developed in the Hyper-SuprimeCam pipeline, in addition to many other improvements.  Learn more on the Community Forum here.  

Andy Connolly gave a well-received (and well attended) talk at LSST@Europe2, discussing the History of the Universe and explaining how and why LSST is needed to answer the biggest questions.  The video of the talk is here and of the round-table that followed here.

Corporation News

LSSTC is pleased to announce that a consortium of Kentucky universities and state colleges has been approved as a new institutional member by the Corporation’s Board of Directors. The consortium’s official name is the Kentucky Association for Research with LSST, or KARL.

A workshop on Precision Astronomy with Fully Depleted CCDs (PACCD2016) will take place at Brookhaven National Lab 1-2 December, 2016.  The workshop will have a large representation of LSST people and has received financial support from LSSTC. 

The LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program’s first class of fellows is ready to begin their week-long coursework on August 1st.  Sixteen students make up the class (bios here) and were selected from a pool of over 230 applicants. This LSSTC-funded program is designed to teach essential data science skills required for LSST science including statistics, machine learning, and scalable programming. 

Personnel News

James Howard has joined the LSST Telescope and Site team working with Jacques Sebag as an Instrumentation Mechanical Design Engineer.  James will perform varied tasks to design and to oversee the fabrication, testing, installation and use of the instrumentation required during the telescope integration and tests (I&T) on the LSST summit site on Cerro Pachón, in Chile.  For the past 12 years he was a Principal Mechanical Engineer at the Large Binocular Telescope, where he was responsible for designing, implementing and commissioning various subsystems.

Grissel (“Chris”) Coleman has joined the LSST Telescope and Site team as Deputy Manager for Project Controls. Chris comes to us after providing senior management oversight at Raytheon and Honeywell, focusing on project planning and earned value management. She will be working with Bill Gressler and Sandrine Thomas to coordinate work flow and resources to support the integrated construction effort.

Eli Rykoff has joined the Data Management team as part of the Princeton-based Data Release Production group. He will be contributing to LSST's calibration products and annual data release pipelines. Eli will be located at SLAC, where he was already an employee, and will spend half his time continuing his research there on photometric calibration, galaxy cluster finding, and cluster cosmology in the context of DES and LSST-DESC.

Upcoming Meeting with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

July 18-22: Dark Energy School & Hack Day at LSST DESC Meeting *, Oxford University, UK

July 22-23: The 2016 LSST Galaxies Workshop*, at Oxford University, UK

July 27-29: 2016 Director's Review of Project Status, SLAC

August 1-5, 2016: LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program *, Northwestern University, IL

August 15-19: LSST 2016 Project & Community Workshop, Tucson, AZ

August 16-18: LSST Joint Status Review, Tucson, AZ

October 27 - 29: Society of Women Engineers Meeting, Philadelphia, PA

November 16-18: Preparing for Supernova Science in the LSST Era: A Kick-Off Workshop * University of Pittsburgh, PA

December 1-2: Precision Astronomy with Fully Depleted CCDs*, BNL

Late Nov/ Early Dec: Towards Science in Chile with the LSST 2016 *Vina del Mar, Chile

January 3, 2017 (TBC): ZTF Community Workshop at AAS 229 *AAS 229 Meeting, Grapevine, TX

January 3-7, 2017: LSST AGN Science Collaboration Roadmap Development Meeting * AAS 229 Meeting; Grapevine, TX

February 27-March 2, 2017: Detecting the Unexpected: Discovery in the Era of Astronomically Big Data* Location TBD