Rubin Digest 18 December 2018

18 December 2018

Project & Science News

Happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year from LSST! The next LSST News Digest will be distributed on January 15th, 2019.

LSST will have representation at the 233rd AAS Meeting in Seattle, WA, January 7-10. If you’ll be attending the meeting and would like to help staff the LSST exhibitor booth (#113), or our Job Fair table (January 8, Noon-6:30 pm), please email us at communications-team@lists.lsst.org. We also encourage you to attend the LSST Town Hall on January 9th at 7:30 pm in room 6C.

The latest LSST “Day in the Life” video is now available in the LSST Gallery, the fourth in a series that highlights the diversity of efforts undertaken by our distributed team. Thanks to everyone who contributed photos—keep up the good work.

An update from the PLAsTiCC Astronomical Classification Challenge: The final submission deadline for the main Kaggle prize has passed; however, even if participants aren’t in the top tier, they can still enter the scientific part of the competition until January 15th. The PLAsTiCC team will select winners of scientifically novel algorithms, or those that perform well in specific areas. Prizes for this part of the challenge include presenting your approach at a scientific meeting.

On December 7th, the vessel carrying the 3.5-meter LSST Secondary Mirror (M2) arrived at the Port of Coquimbo in Chile, and M2 was safely offloaded. The smaller cargo boxes were secured on transport vehicles and taken to the summit the next day. M2 arrived on the summit on December 12th. Photos of the transport and arrival are available in the LSST Gallery.

It is with great regret that we report the sudden passing of Jim Parsons, one of our NCSA colleagues. Our thoughts are with his family and our team at NCSA. There is a Data Management (DM) community post (https://community.lsst.org/c/dm) that is being updated with information and arrangements as they are available; the thread also offers a forum to express sentiments that will be forwarded to Jim’s family.

Project members please note: LSST IT department has retired the aging server, listserv.lsstcorp.org. As a result, the mailing lists found at this link have either been moved here (if known to be active), or archived here (login required). Active lists will forward to the new location for one month. If you experience issues or have questions about a lsstcorp mailing list, please email IT.

Corporation News

The LSST Corporation 2019 Enabling Science Call for Proposals is now open! Information on the call may be found at this link. Proposals are due no later than midnight on Sunday, January 6, 2019. Please see the call and the associated template for proposal submission information and guidelines. We look forward to receiving your proposals in response to this call.

The LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program (LSSTC DSFP) is looking for host institutions for future sessions. The LSST DSFP is a two-year training program,  designed to teach students in astronomy-related fields (e.g. astrophysics, cosmology, planetary science, etc.) essential skills for dealing with big data from LSST. The application to host a session is available at this link.

Personnel News

Andrés Plazas Malagón joined the Data Management subsystem as a Software Scientist on November 1st. Based in Princeton, Andrés will work on the Data Management code which will be used for performing Instrument Signature Removal (ISR) during pipeline processing of LSST data. He will work closely with the Camera Team to understand the characteristics and performance of the LSST detectors.

Rémy Joseph also joined the Data Management subsystem on December 1st as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Rémy will work in Princeton as a member of LSST's Data Release Production team to define and develop methods for deblending galaxies and stars which can make use of multi-band and multi-resolution imaging data.

Upcoming Meetings with LSST Involvement

(those with asterisk* are LSSTC funded):

2018

December 17-21: South American Workshop on Cosmology in the LSST Era, Sao Paulo, Brazil

2019

January 6-10: AAS 233rd Meeting, Seattle, WA

January 16-17: AMCL Meeting, Tucson, AZ

January 22-23: Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) Meeting, Princeton, NJ

Feb 26 - Mar 1: Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) Collaboration Meeting and Hack Day.*

May 20-23: LSST@Asia, Sydney, Australia*