Using LSST and rubin_sim at UCSB

Support
#1

Since I am new to this form, I will briefly introduce myself. My name is Alex Thomas and I’m a rising senior in the UCSB Experimental Cosmology Group doing astrophysics research under Dr. Philip Lubin. We’ve been working for four years to develop our own transient detection pipeline and we’re hoping comparisons to your pipeline will enable us to improve our own or even remove the need for our own pipeline. We use our pipeline to analyze pre-processed data coming from the Los Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCO) and we’re working towards gathering our own data using 0.5-meter and/or 1-meter telescopes in parallel to create large scale surveys. We’re hoping to install the LSST pipeline and rubin-sim software to compare with our own internal pipeline and skymaker. We currently use skymaker for most simulations as its easily learnable by undergraduate researchers and taught in our courses but rubin_sim may be an alternative.

I’ve been having serious trouble installing lsst and rubin_sim and wanted to establish a line of communication to get it operational, and better understand the capabilities of your pipeline. Is there a time I could meet with members of your team to help me get these operation? We have multiple machines with different operating systems and hardware available so I’m sure we can use something that meets LSST requirements. Please let me know when would be convenient for you. Thank you for your help.

#2

Hi Alex, thanks for posting. I’m bringing this topic to the attention of @ljones and her Survey Strategy team.

#3

What problem are you having installing the science pipeline software? If you are wanting to follow pipeline developments you should be installing our weekly releases (such as w_2022_28). Are you following the instructions in The LSST Science Pipelines — LSST Science Pipelines ?

#4

Hi Alex,

I’m not familiar with skymaker, but it looks like it’s an image simulation program.
I suspect then you’re trying to get the actual lsst software stack installed, which comes with galsim (which can simulate images), and use parts of rubin_sim to help feed the galsim inputs.

This is more along the lines of what the DESC image simulation group are doing, so that group would likely be a good help for issues related to image simulation in particular.
Are you having trouble installing rubin_sim itself, or is it the lsst software stack that is causing problems?
If it’s rubin_sim, I should be able to help.

Lynne