Survey Strategy Cadence Notes deadline extension

Science Survey Strategy
#1

Dear Colleagues,
We would like to inform you that the original March 15, 2021 deadline for submitting Cadence Notes has been extended to April 15, 2021. The main reason for this

extension is that the SCOC wants to ensure the community has sufficient time to incorporate the new v1.7 simulations (https://ls.st/cadsims17) into the Cadence Notes

In addition, here is a clarification of the call for Cadence Notes prompted by several questions from the colleagues preparing Cadence Notes:

  • please try to address our questions within the suggested 3 page limit, but please don’t skip meaningful points just so that your Cadence Note doesn’t exceed this limit. We will not reject any submissions for violating the page limit.

  • if it seems that what you have to say would take much longer than 3 pages, perhaps you need to submit more than one Cadence Note

  • if unsure, don’t agonize over it but describe your case to Zeljko in an email
    (ivezic@uw.edu) and he’ll discuss it with the SCOC and get back to you promptly.

We anticipate that in about two weeks we will release additional summary documents about existing and new cadence simulations, and tools to explore them. And lastly, a reminder that there is a lot of information about cadence optimization already available at https://community.lsst.org/c/sci/survey-strategy/37

Sincerely,
Peter, for Zeljko, for the Survey Cadence Optimization Committee

#2

To follow up on this (as was sent to the project mailing list)

Dear Colleagues,

As part of the process to determine the Rubin Observatory LSST survey strategy, the LSST Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC) issued a call for Cadence Notes from the community last December. The goal of the Cadence Notes is to elicit feedback on specific observing strategy questions, illuminated in part by specific survey simulations released August 2020 (v1.5 and v1.6 releases) and augmented by an additional set of simulations released at the start of February 2021 (v1.7: https://ls.st/cadsims17).

** The deadline for submission of the Cadence Notes has been extended to April 15, 2021 ** from its original date of March 15, 2021. This change is intended to provide the community additional time to evaluate the new simulations in v1.7 (in particular, new and much improved ‘rolling cadence’ simulations in this release). It also provided to the Project Survey Strategy team an opportunity to release additional documentation about all of the available simulations, announced here. This additional documentation comes complete with some powerful new tools and Jupyter notebooks to aid comparison of metrics across multiple cadence simulations.

The new documentation includes the “SummaryInfo” notebook. This notebook provides short high-level descriptions of each group of simulations, as well brief comparison metrics describing the area and number of visits in each survey simulation. The notebook was built using a new tool which enables anyone to analyze metric outputs within these families to evaluate trends more easily; we have also provided a short demonstration of this tool. A git clone of the lsst-pst:survey_strategy github repository will provide a user with both of these notebooks as well as the summary values of metrics already calculated in the MAF software for each of the simulations. For more in-depth descriptions of the cadence simulations, a subset of our metrics, and the survey strategy trades which are under discussion in the Cadence Notes, please see the Cadence Report (PSTN-051).

And lastly, a reminder that there is a lot of information about cadence optimization available at

https://community.lsst.org/c/sci/survey-strategy/

and detailed technical discussions are also taking place on the Slack channel #sims-maf

If you have questions for the SCOC or the Project, please contact Zeljko in an email (ivezic@uw.edu).

  Lynne Jones and Zeljko Ivezic, for the SCOC and the Project Survey Strategy team