SMWLV-TVS Observing Strategy Hack Day 2, Thursday March 4th, 10:00am - 3:00pm EST

[willclarkson]

Hi all - this is to let you know that we will be holding our second Observing Strategy Hack Day, now joint between SMWLV and TVS, on Thursday March 4th 2021, from 10:00am - 3:00pm EST (there will be two 2-hour sessions, and attendees should feel free to attend as much or as little as they wish). This Community Thread will be the internet home of the cadence hack day.

The link and password to enter the meeting can be found at the top of the sign-up sheet, as well as in the google docs and slide deck linked below.

Because we are planning on using Gather Town to host this second hack day, we’d like to have an idea of how many participants to expect. Therefore, if you are planning to attend on March 4th, please fill in the sign-up sheet at this link.

The main objectives for this second hack day are: 1. Complete the specification of figures of merit for cadence investigations, and/or 2. Start the implementation of your figure of merit, likely in a Jupyter notebook. A few notes:

• The format will be broadly similar to the Feb 18th cadence hack day: most of the time will be spent similarly to an “unconference,” for people to work together in their cadence investigations. The March 4th schedule can be found at this link.

• Here are the welcome slides for the meeting.

• If you are expecting to work on coding your investigation in MAF, we recommend that you request a NOIRLAB-Datalab account at least a day or so before the meeting, as Datalab will be the preferred venue for most investigators to run MAF remotely. Information on Datalab, including the link to request an account, can be found at this Community post.

• In addition to this Community thread, we will use the LSSTC Slack channel #cadence-hack-days-smwlv-tvs for discussion during and after the hack day. If you wish to be added to this channel, please contact @willclarkson .

• Additional resources can be found at the Community post for the Feb 18th SMWLV Observing Strategy Hack Day.

• 2021-02-25 update: the following post by @ljones gathers lots of useful survey strategy information in an organized way: Community Survey Strategy Highlights

Cheers

Will Clarkson, for the SMWLV Observing Strategy Task Force

[willclarkson]

Update: in case you are not familiar with Gathertown: Gathertown cheat-sheet and informal guide (google doc, editable by all). Much more comprehensive information is at Gathertown’s “Getting Started” page.

Here is a key to the virtual meeting space, with room labels indicated:

[willclarkson]

Hi folks - here are the room topics for the 1000-1200 EST session:

• Fast Transient Metrics: → “TVS”
• Galactic plane coverage: → “SMWLV”
• Crowding Metrics: → “Solar System”
• Astrometry: → “Informatics and Statistics”
• Galactic Bulge: → “Strong Lensing”
• Magellanic Clouds: → “Galaxies”
• Short exposures / saturation metric: → “AGN”

[willclarkson]

Hi folks - we’re in “lunch” break and will re-start at 1300 EST. To join:

• Click on the link near the top of the sign-up sheet, and enter the password.
• This will drop you into the Gathertown virtual workspace. Although there is no zoom feature, clicking the “map” icon near the bottom of the screen will show you the entire meeting space.
• We’ll start the “plenary” welcome at or just after 1305 EST. If there are fewer than about ten of us in the meeting space at that point, we’ll just assemble in the “SMWLV” room. Use the arrow keys to move your avatar to the SMWLV room, which is the middle-right meeting room in the virtual conference space.

If there are more than about ten of us, we’ll make our way to the “Plenary” area for the welcome (a gathertown “chat” message will indicate if we’re doing this). Here’s how that works:

• To enter the plenary from Gathertown, move your character all the way to the top of the meeting space, over the big word “Plenary” in the floor.
• This will put you in a darker room. You will be prompted to hit “x” to join the plenary. Behind the scenes, this takes you across into the Zoom call.
• For more information on Gathertown, see this informal cheat sheet, or the Gathertown “getting started” documentation.

[willclarkson]

HI folks - here are the topics for the afternoon hack day session:

• Fast Transient Metrics: → “TVS”
• Bulge, Crowded fields, disk issues: → “SMWLV”
• Variability in the Magellanic Clouds: → “Solar System”
• Astrometry: → “Informatics and Statistics”
• Star Clusters: → “Strong Lensing”

For more, see the breakout rooms page and the meeting space plan above.

[willclarkson]

Hi all - thanks for a productive second hack day! Attendees: if you haven’t already done so, you can make a note of any TODOs or issues you have identified, in slides 13-15 of the welcome presentation (the slides titled “Issues and TODOs”.

Link: welcome slides