We are pleased to announce the initial call for input for the development and implementation of Community Alert Filters for the ANTARES broker. A primary goal of these “community filters” are to provide the community with a low barrier-to-entry starting point to conduct science with Rubin alerts. The community filters should therefore cover a broad range of science cases for Rubin alerts.
Rubin Observatory will incorporate the science community’s input from this call to develop, implement, and validate an initial set of ~5 community filters for the ANTARES broker. In the future, we anticipate supporting up to 20 community filters. The community filters will:
be designed to prevent redundancy among user-defined filters,
together as a set, serve a broad range of science interests,
each meet at least one well-defined science goal,
significantly down-select the number of alerts per visit,
In this form (est. completion time ~5-10 min), we ask you to contribute a short statement that either proposes a filter (in words and/or in code) and describes a science case that a filter should meet. The deadline for the call for input is Friday May 30, 2025.
For more information, please refer to the following resources:
As a co-chair of the SSSC, I ask the Observatory to please support the user community for this call with more than links to documents and a link to a presentation on how to use ANTARES which is not clear to me is how one would use these filters. Given only 5 filters are initially being set up this is a significant amount of time to craft the filter proposal that could be selected in this round . It would help if there was some kind of short webinar to help the community to digest these multiple documents and with time for a live Q+A for people in the community to ask questions.
Hi Meg,
Thanks for raising those points. We’re hoping to use this call as an opportunity to solicit feedback and provide information on alert filters and brokers. We, the community science team, are indeed planning to host webinars to help the community get caught up to speed on these materials (e.g. in a future science assembly).
To address your first point about use cases for filters. This is probably not the most satisfying answer, but from my perspective it depends on the science you want to do and what timescales and information you need (e.g. to plan follow-up observations.). As a more specific example, I’m interested in dust-forming sources, so I created a filter in ANTARES that looks for transients/variables in ZTF that looks for things that exhibited “recent reddening” (see under Level 2 filters here).
Happy to address more questions you may have, and thanks again for the feedback.
It’s hard to tell what the scope is for Solar System objects since ANTARES doesn’t handle solar system alerts. Hence why I am asking for a presentation on this rather than doing this after asking the community to spend further time unpaid to propose filters that won’t be feasible.
Hi Meg – Do you know what the status of the SNAPS downstream broker is? I understood that they were working with ANTARES to set up a broker specifically to support Solar System with the alert stream - -but I am not up to date on their activities?
@davidtrilling , would you be able to provide us an update on SNAPS? From a quick search, we did find this recent paper by Gowanlock et al. (2024), but it’d be great to hear if there’s additional documentation/info.
My understanding is that their timeline for development is not public. There was a presentation several months ago to the SSSC Community software/infrastructure development working group, but the website has very limited information.