Following the completion of the Early Operations Phase, Rubin Observatory is now in its 3rd week of steady-state LSST survey operations. This week (dayObs 20260710 to 20260716), the telescope logged 22 hours of open-shutter time across 2669 science visits, median delivered image quality of 1.08" FWHM, although with significant downtime due to weather (clouds, wind). Even with the current limited template coverage, the Rubin pipelines sent about 1.4 million individual robust difference-image (DIA) sources to the Brokers, across 337 processed visits, and associated 85,640 Solar System objects. The night operations staff executed a few engineering tests to support our initiative to achieve improved delivered image quality performance during the 10-year LSST, including deliberate tests to refine the effects of telescope elevation and rotation in the AOS look up tables, and operational tests of specially-trained ML algorithms to improve AOS performance.
The first LSST Target of Opportunity trigger was executed last Thursday, based on an IceCube detection. You can read the Community Post about it here: Target of Opportunity - IceCube-260708A
The daytime activities this week were focused on preparing for the current winter storm, plus the imminent commissioning of the first moving panel of the Light-Wind Screen (LWS). The Cerro Pachón mountain was evacuated Wednesday afternoon, after the team put the system in a safe state, including warming up all the scientific cameras. Because of this, we do not expect to be on sky until Tuesday at the earliest, once the staff return to the summit to assess the state of the system and initiate the pumping and cooling process for the cameras. The current filter set remains {ugriz} and expect the swap of u-band for y-band to be executed next week, with a possible delay because of the storm-recovery activities.
Please continue to follow Rubin live status page for real-time updates at Rubin Live Status. As always, feedback from the science community on what’s most useful in these updates is welcome.