The commissioning pointing database that was put onto the RSP is in essence the SQLite database produced by the Rubin Scheduler. Folks that been involved with the LSST cadence optimization process are familiar with the format of this database file. Given there are no prompt product database until at least July next year, can the output of the this SQLite database be made available/be updated on a frequent basis (weekly or if possible daily) either on then RSP or a website just as was done during SV on this website? This would allow planning of follow-up observations and getting a sense for where Rubin is looking on the sky when the survey starts (hopefully at the very end of the month).
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Hi Meg, thanks for this.
As it turned out, the Rubin Scheduler Viewer was already publicly accessible. Leanne Guy and I have put together a tutorial on how to use it, and it’s now available in the Rubin Science Platform under the “Tutorials” menu in the “Commissioning” folder (it’s number 102).
A few side notes: There’s not currently any associated documentation for this service aside from the tutorial, that is still to come. The data obtained via the Rubin Schedule Viewer is not the same as a database of the observed visits and their metadata (the other database you mention, available via the 101 Commissioning tutorial), but that will come later in 2026. But, this new service and tutorial should be sufficient for people setting up their workflows to plan follow-up or “shadowing” programs.
I’m going to mark this as the solution for this topic but as always, if this wasn’t quite what you’re looking for please unmark it and reply. And any new questions about the Rubin Schedule Viewer are welcome as new Support topics.
Thanks. That is handy, but that’s not sufficient for planetary astronomers. That notebook is great if your trying to understand whether a field with an interesting supernovae was observed in a given night. Solar System objects move so I actually need to know the time Rubin observed the pointing (in addition to the filter/band). That information does not seem to be available in table. The filter is needed because in u and y-band most Solar System objects are not going to be visible.
Hi Meg, the Rubin Schedule Viewer is following VO protocol, which doesn’t specify “band” but does specify em_min and em_max (partly because of the widely varying band names across different observatories, I’d guess). Documentation on the ObsLocTap protocol itself is here - https://www.ivoa.net/documents/ObsLocTAP/20200514/PR-ObsLocTAP-1.0-20200514.pdf
I get your point though, that this is not the most useful format for just seeing “where did Rubin observe over a given time range”. There are actually lots of plans to get this information available.
Consdb itself will be available from data.lsst.cloud; I think the plan is to complete this on the same timescale as the prompt products database. The NightlyDigest may allow downloads of the exposure information from a user-specified range of nights, on some timeframe (currently not well defined, but might be sooner than PPDB). And we could just re-start the creation of the opsim-format databases like we did during SV.
I haven’t heard any objections to creating the databases like we did during SV, so we’ll start that up again, along with some of our other survey progress reporting.
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