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Research
About Rubin Observatory
The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a groundbreaking new observatory, located on Cerro Pachón in Chile, which will revolutionize the way we explore the cosmos. Using the largest camera ever built, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for 10 years and create the greatest cosmic movie ever made. To learn more about the observatory, its science and the first images revealed, visit rubinobservatory.org.
NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Rubin Observatory is a joint program of NSF's NOIRLab and DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Rubin Observatory recognizes the unique and important role of public participation and collaborates with the Zooniverse to support projects like this. Zooniverse citizen science projects with Rubin data are supported by UK Research and Innovation through STFC.
Rubin Observatory will conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), starting in late 2025. The data used in this project is preliminary data used to calibrate and guarantee the observatory is working fine.
Alerts Pipeline
The night sky is full of objects that change in brightness or move through our Solar System, but if we're not looking in the right place at the right time we'll miss them — especially if they’re far away or don’t give off much light. Rubin Observatory was designed specifically to detect changes in the sky on a broad scale and to alert us to each one. Rubin automatically compares new images to older images to detect changes in an object's position or brightness, and it generates an alert for each change it observes. If a star explodes or an asteroid moves across the sky, Rubin will catch it in the act.
There are a couple of reasons Rubin Observatory is particularly good at detecting changes. First, the telescope moves so quickly that it revisits the same area of sky every few nights, which means it can frequently capture images of the same objects. Second, Rubin Observatory's light-collecting power and sensitive camera ensure that even faint or faraway objects that change will trigger an alert. Rubin's combination of speed and imaging power helps it detect a lot of action — about ten million alerts are generated every single night! This constant series of alerts is called the "alert stream".
Your contribution to the Rubin's Alerts Pipeline!
The Rubin Alert Pipeline is expected to generate ten million alerts each night! That is more data than any person or small team can handle. Your task is to look at a subset of our data and tell us what you see. Your contribution will be instrumental in fine-tuning the image processing pipelines to be deployed by the Rubin Alert Production team.
To go through 10s of millions of detections and reject artifacts (i.e., the bogus ones), we have built a Deep Convolutional Neural Network. The information you provide to us will be used to improve this machine learning classifier to identify changing objects in the universe more rapidly and with higher confidence.
Your efforts will ensure that we are well-prepared to make groundbreaking discoveries right when the LSST starts.