Rubin Community Workshop 2024

This year’s Rubin Community Workshop (Rubin 2024), held from July 22-26 at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, CA, marked another productive and inspiring annual meeting. This was Rubin’s 15th annual gathering, and it featured some significant changes from past years’ meetings. These included a shift in physical location — most years’ meetings have been held in Tucson, AZ — and being fully hybrid for the first time, with the option to connect virtually with all plenary and breakout sessions. This year’s meeting focused on boosting engagement with the science community while maintaining strong participation from Rubin project members as Rubin moves closer to Operations. By this time next year, Rubin Observatory will have achieved first light and will be preparing for the launch of the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)!

The five-day meeting had a packed agenda of daily plenary and parallel sessions, beginning with a welcome and overall status update on Monday morning from Bob Blum, Director of Rubin Operations. Breakout sessions followed, as well as the first of several “brown bag” lunch opportunities for informal networking and a themed discussion. Monday’s lunch was a LGBTQIA+ social; other lunches throughout the week included a student social, an open house hosted by the Informatics and Statistics Science Collaboration, and a discussion about reducing Rubin’s carbon footprint.

On Tuesday morning, meeting participants were invited to gather before the plenary session for a virtual tour of the summit. Rubin team members Yijung Kang, Craig Lage, and Kevin Reil connected via Zoom to show off the Observatory facility, Auxiliary Telescope, and sweeping views of the Chilean Andes. The following plenary featured a talk from Jeno Sokowloski about the role and benefits of joining the LSST Discovery Alliance (LSST-DA). Then came four excellent “Lightning Story” talks from Rubin team members Azalee Bostroem, Mark Pitts, Fernanda Urrutia, and Orion Eiger. The plenary session concluded with 30-second flash talks from the meeting’s LSST-DA–sponsored student participants, encouraging attendees to visit their posters during the week’s afternoon breaks.

On Tuesday evening, the SLAC Café provided the venue and refreshments for a lively indoor/outdoor reception. Then, once the sun went down, the LSST-DA and the SETI Institute partnered to offer a Rubin/LSST–themed Star Party, with Unistellar smart digital telescopes (eVscopes) set up to observe deep space objects and transient phenomena. Thanks to the volunteers who stayed at their telescopes until the last stargazers called it a night — at nearly 11:00 p.m.!

The Wednesday morning plenary featured short presentations from each of Rubin’s eight science collaborations, followed by a full day of breakout sessions. The day’s session agenda concluded with what has become a regular feature at Rubin’s annual meetings: parallel “Unconference” sessions on topics proposed and voted on by conference attendees. In the early evening, people were invited to drop in at an “open house” in SLAC’s Rubin Control Room and chat with the team remotely operating and observing with the Rubin Auxiliary Telescope on Cerro Pachón.

On Thursday, a plenary titled, “Rubin Research Spotlights” featured four speakers invited by the Science Organizing Committee to present on timely Rubin research projects. Louise Edwards (Cal Poly), Jamie Robinson (Princeton), Ashley Villar (Harvard), and Nikki Arendse (Stockholm University) gave well-received talks in this session. In addition to the day’s following breakout sessions, Hannah Pollek and Travis Lange from Rubin’s LSST Camera team hosted a lunchtime “show and tell” of a spare raft tower module for the 3200-megapixel LSST Camera, which shipped to Chile from SLAC in May 2024.

The last day of the meeting was scheduled as a half day, which kicked off with the Rubin Project Keynote talk, in which Phil Marshall, Lynne Jones, Federica Bianco presented on the collaborative efforts of the Rubin Survey Strategy team, the Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC), and Rubin community to converge on the LSST baseline survey strategy. The day’s agenda concluded with a final block of parallel sessions, after which participants who had traveled to SLAC began their journeys home. Thanks to SLAC for hosting this memorable event, and to the Scientific Organizing Committee and Local Organizing Committee for their hard work on a very successful Rubin 2024! Additional photos are available at this link, and recordings of sessions are available on Rubin’s YouTube channel.