Dear colleagues,
One of the highlights of the LSST workshop was the workshop on deblending organized by Sarah Brough et al.
We had a nice report from Veronica Dike (UCLA) on how the current LSST stack did on bulge DECam data compared to the BDBS daophot pipeline. Without trying to summarize any technical details here, I think it’s fair to say it’s not doing as well (yet) as we’d like.
However, there is a new galaxy deblender called “scarlet” which will (probably?) replace the current deblender. There was a great interest at the meeting in running scarlet on real datasets where stars are important. The feeling seems to be that with the right tuning scarlet would do well but a parameter study is needed. We could cooperate with TVS in this; they’ve formed a crowded field photometry task force. Colin Slater has appropriate real data.
I don’t know if the existing Galactic Bulge working group should take this on or if we want to form a new group. I have an undergraduate student who is interested. We have a lot of interest last year ( Organizing Crowded Field Photometry Test Data Sets ) but now there’s definite software to test.
Thoughts? Volunteers?
John