Hello!
Welcome to the community.lsst.org (CLO) category dedicated to LSST Survey Strategy discussions.
As the About the Survey Strategy category post explains, this category is intended to be a community resource to ask questions about the call for white papers, as well as more general questions about LSST survey strategy optimization.
For more help about CLO itself, such as how to sign up or how to receive emails when new topics are added, please see
The LSST Project members you will find responsible for addressing questions here include myself (@ljones), Tiago Ribeiro (@tribeiro), Owen Boberg (@oboberg) and Zeljko Ivezic (@ivezic).
I’m planning on writing informal updates here, roughly monthly, to help provide a better view into what’s going on with the Survey Strategy and Scheduler groups.
So here the first informal update on our activities!
Call for white papers
As many of you know, we’ve been working hard on the call for white papers. We’ve been getting writing, editing and feedback on the call itself (which is a somewhat lengthy document), writing supporting documentation (you can always have better documentation!), and generating a range of simulated surveys to go with the call.
The call will go out by the end of June, but since I’ve been seeing a lot of people eager to get started (wonderful!), here are a few resources that may be helpful.
- Survey constraints
- Simulations expected to be available with the WP call
- Description of baseline2018a (includes evolution from minion_1016 to baseline2018a)
- Baseline2018a database - please go to http://astro-lsst-01.astro.washington.edu:8080/ and look for baseline2018a.db.gz (exact link may change, but will be available here).
- Community Observing Strategy Evaluation Paper (the work previously known as the “Observing Strategy White Paper” … renamed COSEP to avoid misunderstandings with the soon-to-be requested white papers on survey strategy).
Scheduler Code
There has also been significant work going on with the scheduler code. We have made the change from Opsim v3 to Opsim v4, but we are also now preparing to move to a more flexible scheduler codebase called the “Feature Based Scheduler” (FBS for short … prizes to who comes up with the best name). We will to do significant updates on the FBS codebase over the next few months. It is unfortunate timing, but we believe this is the best move for the long haul. However, a functional version of code will be available at all points, so if you have something to simulate, you can definitely work with either opsim v4 or FBS (and we will provide docker containers for both). However we can’t guarantee that if you write something for FBS as it is now, that your code will work without modification after we finish the updates. On the other hand, I don’t believe that the underlying structure of the FBS code will change enough to make it hard to reconcile afterwards.
BUT NOTE - it is most definitely NOT required for you to run the scheduler or create code to generate your desired sequence of observations in order to submit a white paper! We will require a way to evaluate the scientific performance of a series of observations (from your point of view), but you don’t actually even have to write a MAF metric for that (though we’d love it if you did). So seriously, you don’t have to do any programming to write and submit a white paper.
So – welcome, please ask any questions and feel free to open discussion threads (“new topics”).
Lynne Jones
(LSST / UW)