Rubin Digest 05 March 2024

6 March 2024

Project & Science News

This year’s Rubin Community Workshop 2024 (formerly PCW) will take place July 22-26 at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, CA. All are welcome to suggest breakout session topics and to submit abstracts for contributed talks and posters (deadline April 5th), details are available on community.lsst.org. Information about registration will be circulated soon.

Thanks to everyone who uploaded a photo or video clip for this year’s Rubin Day in the Life (DITL) initiative — there were 115 submissions this year. The video will be released in the coming weeks, watch in Slack for a link.

March is Women’s History Month, and Rubin is hosting “social media takeover days” throughout the month. Follow Rubin’s accounts on X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn for more information and to enjoy posts provided by women from the Rubin community. We’ll also share these posts on the #rubin-social-media channel on Slack.

A large team from IN2P3 in France visited SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory over the last two weeks to work on the Camera Filter Exchange system. During this very successful visit both the second Filter Auto-Changer (which moves the filters from the carousel to the optical path) and second Filter Loader (which installs and removes filters from the Camera) were qualified by integrating these with the Camera. With this work completed, the off-Camera Filter Exchange hardware was packed up for shipment with the Camera.

Rubin is prominently featured in a new video highlighting the development of astronomy in Chile. The video, available on YouTube in English and Spanish, was produced by the Fundación Imagen de Chile, with footage taken in January 2024 at the AURA Recinto, Cerro Pachón, and Cerro Tololo and coordination by the AURA-O team in Chile. 

Registration is now open for the “Time Domain Needles in Rubin’s Haystack” Hackathon, scheduled for April 17th-19th, 2024 at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA. The 2.5 day hackathon will bring together time-domain astrophysicists and experts in anomaly detection to design strategies for novel event discovery and characterization with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Details and a link to register can be found on the meeting website.

Rubin in the Media:

Rubin Observatory was the central feature of a CNN Chile video broadcast on February 20th, featuring interviews with Rubin and AURA staff. Watch the video (in Spanish) at this link. 

Operations Updates: 

All are welcome to join a new weekly series of one-hour Rubin Science Assemblies, live virtual sessions that focus on learning to use the Rubin Science Platform. The sessions take place on Thursdays at 9am Pacific Time. More information and a schedule of session topics can be found on community.lsst.org. 

Personnel Announcements & Opportunities

Robert Gruendl re-joined the Data Management team on February 16th as Senior Research Scientist. Based at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Robert will be supporting work on the LSST Science Pipelines.

Karla Peña joined the Rubin team as Observing Specialist - Senior on March 1st. Karla will be a member of the Observing team operating Rubin Auxiliary Telescope and the Simonyi Survey Telescope on the summit during Construction, Commissioning, and Operations. 

Pierre-François Leget joined the Data Management team on March 1st as Pipeline Scientist. Pierre-François will be based at Princeton and will be working on algorithm development for Data Management’s Science Pipelines.

Information about open positions with Rubin can be found on the Rubin hiring page.

Info for Project Members

Nominate someone for Rubin’s staff awards program to recognize outstanding performance! More information and the nomination form are available on the Staff Awards page on the Project website (login required).

If you’d like to schedule a one-on-one meeting with Victor or Zeljko, please fill out this form to indicate your preferred date and time. 

There is also an anonymous “suggestion box” for anyone to offer feedback at this link. 

Rubin Observatory swag items, including t-shirts, coffee mugs, tote bags, and more, are available for purchase in our not-for-profit online store. 

Upcoming Meetings with Rubin Observatory Involvement

(those with an asterisk* are supported by LSST Discovery Alliance): 

2024

March 12-14	Image Sensors for Precision Astronomy (ISPA) workshop, SLAC/KIPAC*
March 12-15	Strong Gravitational Lensing Science with LSST, Oxford, UK
March 18-20	Rubin ToO 2024, Envisioning the LSST Target of Opportunity Program, Berkeley, CA
March 26-29	NSF Research Infrastructure Workshop, Tucson, AZ
April 15-19	KAVLI-IAU (IAUS 387) Symposium, “(Toward) Discovery of Life Beyond Earth and its Impact,” Durham, UK
April 16-18	Rubin Joint Operations Review, Tucson, AZ
April 17-19	Time-Domain Needles in Rubin’s Haystack, Cambridge, MA
June 16-21	SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation Meeting, Yokohama, Japan
July 8-12	DESC Collaboration Meeting, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
July 22-26	Rubin Community Workshop (formerly PCW), SLAC Menlo Park, CA

Upcoming Deadlines:

2024

April 5

Abstract submittals for Rubin Community Workshop 2024