I am a retired scientist (Biochemist by training) who has been doing astrophotography with some commitment for over 6 years. My question is not about citizen science, but rather about generating interesting astro images from the LSST initiative as public outreach. Certainly at the public level, to generate images that are appealing and also able to communicate the scale and structure of the visible universe. For a couple of years now, I have started to pursue a rather simple, but I feel effective way to visualize the universe beyond the Milky Way that may be able to do so. I will include three links from recent image/written publications that should help with getting my point across: 1. (https://app.astrobin.com/i/gkudu5) 2. (https://app.astrobin.com/i/yuk07l) 3. (https://app.astrobin.com/i/vzjzvr).
I am reaching out to learn more about any collaborative groups that will have specific interests that may overlap my interests. If it were not possible to have access to actual image data files to work with, then I would ask if there might be some other aspect of being involved in such a collaborative working group. At this point, I have not looked into how to access data (if access were granted), what format the image files are , etc. So I will leave these questions as simple as possible at this point.
Just to add, while I am asking about image processing and presentation, I am also a lifelong enthusiast about all thing astronomical, astrophysical, etc. I do a fair amount of reading of primary literature on questions that I run across, or generate within my explorations and photography. That said, at this time, I do not have an interest in the Citizen Science initiative, unless, of course, my questions above fall within the scope of that.
Hi @ABrunelle, thanks for this post! Our Science-EPO category is the best place for this question; as admin I’ve moved your topic into that category where it can be found by people with similar interests.
I thought that I would update information that I recieved regarding my inquiry above, just in case anyone else with similar interests wondered what has transpired. First I got very quick responses with one suggestion to join an open collaboration (ISST), and then after contacting that collaboration, it was suggested that I would likely better fit in with the education and public outreach team. So I put an inquiry in to that organization. I do not know if education and outreach acts similar to the collaborations, as it is my interest to provide voluntary contributions to the effort.
Alan, regarding data access, you may want to have a look at the Rubin Observatory Data Policy page: Data Policy | Rubin Observatory. Roughly speaking, there is public and proprietary data, and the processed images fall in the proprietary category. Access to proprietary data is reserved to data rights holders for two years; after that period, the data become publicly accessible.
It appears you are in the US; again roughly speaking (see the Data Policy docs for details), US scientists actively affiliated with a US educational or research institution automatically have data rights. You may not fall into this category, in which case you may have to wait for two years to get full access to image data (which is accessed via the Rubin Science Platform, which has both a web-based data access portal, and a Python computing environment for image access and colocated processing).
If you’d like quicker access, hopefully interaction with the EPO team can help you find access to some data products, perhaps in collaboration with others. In particular, the EPO team has provided infrastructure for scientists with data rights to make some data available to the public via citizen science projects hosted by the Zooniverse platform (I realize you indicated you are not asking about citizen science, but some citizen science projects might provide image data potentially interesting to you). Some very preliminary/anticipatory information about this is available here: Get Involved in Rubin Research | Rubin Observatory. Note the button there, for signing up to get alerts regarding Rubin-related citizen science projects.
Tom, first thank you for your quick and detailed reply.
Regarding access to data, I will need to review the policy carefully to be sure I fully understand it. So what I say in this reply may end up not being fully informed, but I wanted to reply quickly to maybe clarify some things.
I have to be honest and state that if it was simple to retrieve the sort of data from the LSST that an astrophotographer could make use of I would likely do so. However, primarily, I was hoping to find ways to contribute to whatever group within the LSST will be processing the data for public consumption. If that is the processing of data, and my skills fit, then great. If not, then possibly just offering input as the member of the public, with an understanding of science in general would be fine.
If I were to get image data that I could process myself, I would likely prefer to process image stacks of a specific region, with each stack consisting of many individual exposures, likely collected over days, weeks, etc. For aesthetic reasons, this would very likely remove most of the transient occurances from the final image that I would assume is the primary interest of the data rights holders. Either way, as an individual or as a participant within an official LSST group, under those circumstances I expect that clearing such images for publication is a must. I would need to learn about what the state of the optical image data is in order to know exactly how I would approach it.
You are correct that I live in the USA. Washington state. As a retired professional in a non-astronomical field, it is unlikely that I would strive to join a local university’s LSST collaboration, unless they seek to generate their own public outreach.
Thank you for the time you took to reach out to me and also the links you provided to the resources. I will reseach those. I do feel like I am getting closer to fully understanding what can be done and what is required to do so.