The annual LSST Joint Technical Meeting (JTM) took place in Glendale, CA this week, with 174 in attendance, the largest number of participants yet. This gave the team a chance to review accomplishments and, more importantly, work face-to-face across the distributed project on current challenges.
The 2016 LSST Joint Technical Meeting took place the week of February 22nd in Santa Cruz, CA, bringing 150 members of the project team together for three days of lively discussion and productive work.
Happy engineers at last week's Society of Women Engineers SWE 2015 conference in Nashville. LSST Optics Engineer Constanza Araujo (back row, 4th from left) joined colleagues from Gemini Observatory, the Space Telescope Science Institute, National Solar Observatory, Large Synoptic Solar Telescope, Thirty Meter Telescope, Giant Magellan Telescope, and European Southern Observatory for a week of technical presentations and professional development. Exciting STEM careers in astronomy exist at all these observatories including lsst.org/hiring.
Data Management Team Boot Camp, October 5-7, 2015, took place at three locations simultaneously. Tucson Project Office: A. Abate (UA), F. Economou (LSST), J. Sick (LSST), R. Owen (UW), J M. Peterson (LSST), D. Nidever (LSST), A. Fausti (LSST), T. Jenness (LSST); Princeton: H-F Chiang (NCSA), V. Kasliwal (University of Pennsylvania & Princeton), J. Swinbank (Princeton), J. Garmilla (Princeton), L. MacArthur (Princeton), M.Fisher-Levine (BNL): University of Washington: D. Reiss (UW), Y. AlSayyad (UW), I. Sullivan (UW), B. Abel (UW), N. Pease (SLAC), C. Slater (UW)
Sidney Wolff, John Schaefer, and Don Sweeney watch the lid lifted from the oven to unveil the LSST primary/tertiary mirror blank. UA Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, Tucson, AZ.
Doug Neill, Don Sweeney, and Bill Gressler (L-R) stand in front of the LSST Primary mirror blank positioned on its side in the turn-over fixture after the casting material was removed and the glass readied for polishing of the back surface.
LSST donor Charles Simonyi stopped by the LSST exhibit at the January 2011 meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Pictured (L-R): S. Hutchison, T. Tyson, S. Jacoby, D. Sweeney, C. Claver, C. Simonyi, V. Krabbendam, Z. Ivezic.
Members of the LSST project and science collaborations met at the University of Washington to access newly available test data and discuss user interfaces for operations.