Quick question: are the DP2 coadds (and coadds from future releases) public, and if not, would the collaboration consider making simple color versions of them public?
I ask because I contacted the Aladin team about integrating Rubin coadds as an image survey—for finding charts and general visual inspection—and they weren’t sure whether the images were available for that purpose (Aladin Lite).
I think this would add real value. In my experience, imagery that’s only accessible through a project’s own tools gets used far less. While observing, for example, I would not realistically keep several different websites open to pull finding charts for northern versus southern targets. I’ve also made publication-worthy discoveries simply by browsing Aladin Lite overlays of objects in different surveys.
So this is mainly a pitch: if it’s feasible, serving the coadds through Aladin (as a HiPS survey) seems like a straightforward way to maximize their impact, and provide the definitive image most people would use for their finding charts in the southern half of the sky.
Hi @kburdge thanks for the question.
The deep coadds are included in EDP2.
The RSP Portal has HiPS images.
The Rubin’s Skyviewer uses Aladin Lite and is being developed.
Hi @kburdge, thanks for this question. You are correct that the full DP2 coadded color HiPS maps are not currently publicly accessible, and are only available to Rubin data rights holders via the Rubin Science Platform.
Shenming pointed to Rubin’s Skyviewer app because that is how public subsets of the HiPS maps are currently made available. However, I don’t think that interface quite suits an astronomer’s needs for finder-chart building, though it is great for browsing.
The proprietary period for Rubin data is only two years, and so definitely after that the full color HiPS maps could be made more broadly available. Earlier I’m not sure about, but it could probably be considered. I’ll bring this post to the attention of leadership.
I think that answers your questions and so have marked this topic as solved (but will still report back if I can add any details to the above).
Thanks for looking into it! Good to know that in 2 years it’ll be available broadly, but it would be wonderful if leadership could consider perhaps making an exception for that specific data product sooner than that–I’m sure it would come in handy for many observers, and like I say, also lead to some interesting discoveries as people flip between Rubin and eROSITA DR1, etc. I’m particularly excited because the north is well covered by Pan-STARRS, but unfortunately the south has a sizable gap in the footprint at intermediate Galactic latitudes between DECaPS DR2 and DESI Legacy DR10, and I was super excited to finally have a deep image on Aladin that would cover the entire Southern sky without gaps–as squinting at a DSS image to find a 21+ mag target is never a fun exercise.