Rubin #CommissioningNotes ✍️: Winter is coming.
It was a chilly week at Cerro Pachón in Chile. But our team kept up their commissioning and calibration work, continuing to bring NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory up to full operation as a cohesive system.
Commissioning is an important phase of any project. During this phase, we bring many complex physical & software systems together for the first time.
Calibrations help us understand how everything performs as a whole, and get us ready for operations!
Rubin #CommissioningNotes ✍️: we’re one month into on-sky testing with the LSST Camera!
The letter of the week was “c”: calibrations, computing, commissioning, and sCattered light investigations.
(Yes, we stretched that last one—but the science is solid!)
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Rubin #CommissioningNotes ✍️: The data deluge from NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory is coming!
Rubin captured over 500 exposures per night across 3 nights this week, using its automated observation scheduler — 20x more than during the 7-wk period with the engineering camera last year!
💥 The team is also starting tests of the analysis software that will identify up to 10 million changes in the sky every night.
Rubin #CommissioningNotes ✍️: On-sky engineering tests continued this week!
The team started tuning image quality control systems in real survey-like conditions. LSST Camera is performing smoothly and has captured over 5,000 sky exposures so far (that’s 15 trillion pixels!)
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Eye to the sky…on-sky engineering tests began last week at NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory using the world’s largest digital camera!
After installing and testing the LSST Camera, we turned the telescope to the sky—a moment 20 years in the making!
With that, Rubin #CommissioningNotes are back ✍️
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✍️ Rubin #CommissioningNotes, entry 5️⃣: we’re making gains💪
Efficiency has been the name of the game for the past two weeks! As our team addresses the causes of data-taking interruptions, fewer interruptions occur—meaning even more data overall📈
=== Highlights ===
🌌 Our team consistently increased the number of visits captured each night. In fact, they got a record of nearly 100 in-focus visits in a single night last week using the automated software that drives Rubin’s telescope, called the Feature Based Scheduler.
The nightly average number of visits doubled overall this week, for a few reasons:
💪 Continued efficiency gains with fewer interruptions (and faster recoveries)
⏳ Less time overall between visits thanks to optimizations of the telescope control software
💨 Increasing telescope speed
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There’s only one more week left in this testing period with Rubin’s engineering camera, ComCam! Will the team set a new record? 🤔
For more details from the past two weeks:
🔗 #1: https://community.lsst.org/t/2024-11-29-on-sky-commissioning-update/9604
🔗 #2: https://community.lsst.org/t/2024-12-06-on-sky-commissioning-update/9623
We are now in the fifth week of on-sky commissioning with ComCam. Observations with ComCam are continuing throughout the Thanksgiving holiday week. Earlier in the week, the pointing model for the Simonyi telescope was verified for elevation angles above 45 degrees and over the full range of azimuth angles. In parallel, the Active Optics System (AOS) commissioning effort has continued testing the open loop look-up tables, including scans of telescope elevation angles and camera physical rotator ...
✍️ Rubin #CommissioningNotes, entry 4️⃣: whoaaaaa, we’re halfway there 🎶
Halfway through data-taking with Rubin’s test camera, that is. Our team has continued to make great progress testing Rubin’s systems with ComCam.
=== Highlights ===
🎨 The team got data using all six of Rubin’s wavelength filters for the first time!
💨 The team also continued increasing the telescope’s speed as the systems that manage the forces felt by the mirrors continued to show good response.
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✍️ Rubin #CommissioningNotes, entry 3️⃣: progress continues!
Our team had some exciting accomplishments last week with Rubin's test camera, ComCam:
🏅the best image quality measured so far
🎨 data taken of the sky in five of Rubin's six wavelength filters
Our team has increased the telescope’s speed since tests have shown good control of the systems that manage the forces felt by Rubin’s delicate primary/tertiary mirror. That means more data and more efficient testing!
✍️ Rubin #CommissioningNotes, entry 2️⃣: when you turn it on and it works 🤌
Initial tests with Rubin's test camera, ComCam, showed the telescope was already nearly aligned before even looking at the sky — a testament to decades of work! With further testing, our team continued to improve data quality🥳
Welcome to Rubin's #CommissioningNotes! Entry 1️⃣: we're in full swing!
Ok, but what's "commissioning?"
Rubin is the result of millions of hours of work by thousands of people around the world — all that work is coming together!
Commissioning is the process of testing, troubleshooting, & aligning the different parts & software of Rubin into one functioning system.
Stay tuned for updates on this adventure toward a complete Rubin Observatory as we log progress in our #CommissioningNotes!
Rubin Observatory