Lasair is a broker for astronomers studying transient and variable astrophysical sources. It is being developed as a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and Queen's University, Belfast to build a broker service for alerts generated by the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the Vera Rubin Telescope. We are planning to serve LSST transient alerts to the LSST user community and combine these data with value-added cross-matches against existing catalogues and analysis tools.
To help prototype the functionality needed to process alerts from LSST, Lasair is currently ingesting and presenting alerts from the public stream of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), which is releasing a transient alert stream in a format similar to that envisaged for LSST. We thank ZTF for access to this valuable public data stream. Lasair provides a broker system for users to access, visualise and extract science data.
To find out what Lasair can do and how to use it, please look at the About Lasair link to the left, and the Lasair Cookbook.
Lasair 2.0
On 9th April 2020 we released the stable, functioning version 2.0 of the Lasair broker for processing ZTF alerts. The additions and improvements in this release are- Documentation as above
- A new, upgraded version of the context classifier Sherlock Version 2.0
- We provide a forward look to our broad plans to develop Lasair for the LSST alert stream
- Lasair provides Kafka output for query/filters: contact us for more information.
Acknowledgements
Lasair is supported by the UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council and is a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh (grant ST/N002512/1) and Queen’s University Belfast (grant ST/N002520/1) within the LSST:UK Science Consortium. ZTF is supported by National Science Foundation grant AST-1440341 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW. This research has made use of ``Aladin sky atlas'' developed at CDS, Strasbourg Observatory, France 2000A\&AS..143...33B and 2014ASPC..485..277B.