Hi @ivezic - three questions regarding the interaction between community proposals for new OpSim runs and the development of the observing strategy:
If new OpSim proposals are submitted from the Community before December 2017, can we expect that the runs will be executed? (It seems likely that the Community will want to submit new OpSim proposals soon, both to support v2 of the Observing Strategy Whitepaper and to support work on the next set of DDF / Minisurveys whitepapers.)
If so, does the project prefer that the community consolidate these OpSim proposals before submission (e.g. if several groups want r-band-intensive cadence, to consolidate them into a single OpSim proposal)? Or, are a large number of OpSim proposals expected to be supported even during the rest of 2017?
Is it known yet when the candidate strategies that use v4 of OpSim will be available, and will the equivalents of all the runs currently in the observing strategy whitepaper, be re-run for v4?
Re: 3 - the exact date of when sims created with v4 will be available is not yet determined … I’m really hoping that it will be about a month away though. And yes, we will re-run the strategies that have been done in the “Tier 1” runs (plus the WFD extended across the plane) in v4 (to the level of “recreation” that is possible).
Re: 1 & 2 – Is December 2017 being taken as the deadline here because of the DD call?
I’d venture to guess that we could not support a large number of runs, but that we could do some. What I would like to focus on before the call for proposals is providing a range of “example” runs, covering some range of possibilities for DD and minisurveys. So in that way, providing some community input on what kinds of things would be interesting would be very useful!
Examples of what I would like to do before calling for DD/minisurveys : augmenting the current 5 DD fields to 10 fields (with the same cadence), changing the DD cadence from a long sequence in all filters to a short pattern in some of the filters but repeated more rapidly (i.e. <3 days between sequences). I’m less clear on the variety that would be requested for minisurveys beyond the WFD cadence across the galactic plane. Probably one example would be no NES, no Galactic plane, no SCP, etc (because it’s helpful to have the capability to show what the changes are when these are included).
I’d also like to be able to create a series of rolling cadence runs, using a variety of rolling cadence strategies. This is already a lot, so most likely that the rolling cadence experiments will be “preliminary” and that the support for lots of user suggestions will be small, but that having those suggestions to guide some of these experiments would be useful.
This is open for discussion (and Zeljko’s approval) … just that given our timeline, given the number of “knobs” to turn in the opsimv4 configuration, and given what I think the community ought to have in hand in order to be able to come up with good proposals, this is the path I’d like to see us follow.