Is there an estimate of when we might expect full-sky alerts once the survey truly “begins”? I guess my question is more how long, order of magnitude, will it take to produce good reference images for say ~half of the LSST footprint? Are we talking weeks? Months? My expectation is that when survey starts, most areas will not have references and since cadence will be mostly uniform these will build up at roughly the same rate (w.r.t. noise), and curious to know how long this might take.
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Hi Dan, I’m sure someone will chime in with more up to date/official estimates but we looked into this a bit in this paper. In particular I think you would be interested in the deltaNight metric which is the number of nights between the first visit (in a given filter) to a patch of the sky and when the template was generated. We found that there was generally a lag of ~50 nights before templates were available for a given patch & filter.
NB that we only had a very simple estimate of when a template could be generated! But hopefully this gives a starting point and I’d be happy to chat more about it.
P.S. Now that I’ve been forced to take a closer look at my own paper I have just noticed that the figures that are probably most relevant to you (figs 17 & 18) have gotten muddled up and the captions need swapped… Time to look into issuing a correction, joy!
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Thanks Jamie, this is really useful context :). I hope you can easily make your correction 
Though, if anyone (maybe someone from project?) does have any estimates based on recent context I’d be keen to hear that as well.
Hi @dryczanowski, Section 4.1 of rtn-011.lsst.io gives our most up-to-date expectations for incremental template building in Y1.
You’ll find it it is not presently very quantitative; that’s because concrete plans depend on analysis that is actively underway. I expect we’ll be able to report on that status by RCW this year.
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