Visitors!
It was a really interesting research day, as a large group of “massive star” researchers were visiting Profs. Petit and Owocki, and a small group of Philadelphia-area Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST experts were visiting Prof. Bianco. Class and other obligations kept me away for more time than I would have liked, but we had a discussion of LSST and stars,. Sadly, the ~16th magnitude saturation limit (or is it 17?) limits the direct connection to LSST. They’re cleaning up with TESS though!
Gordon Richards and Weixiang Yu of Drexel stepped us (the LSST folks) through a great system they built for looking at the huge number of LSST observing strategy simulations. It’s a pain to get the LSST MAF framework installed and the databases are over 60GB. So, they put them all on sciserver.org! You can run Jupyter notebooks (or terminal command lines) over there and not have to deal with local installations. It’s the future, though as one who used VAX computers in undergrad and grad school, it’s also the past! Anyway, once the wrinkles are ironed out, they will share the system more broadly and I hope it will be helpful to SMWLV and other collaborations.