I extracted 15 objects from the ALeRCE alerts database for study. These objects were chosen based upon their classification by ALeRCE as type = VS. For my purposes, I also extracted the relevant detections.
To prepare for future study, I pulled objects from GAIA based upon the coordinates (RA/DEC). I believe that there is a good probability that all objects matched with a match value less than 0.5 arc seconds on all of them and a mean match value of less than 0.3 arc seconds.
To compare apparent magnitudes between Rubin and GAIA, I converted the psfFlux values in the ALeRCE data to apparent magnitude using a zero point of 27.5 for the conversion.
My question is this: For both the ALeRCE data and the GAIA data, the apparent magnitudes fall well within 15.0, even some within 14.0. Is this somehow related to the fact that these were early observations or is the telescope performing to a saturation level beyond the expected app mag of 16.0?